Time for a little history lesson, so sit back dearly beloved, and I will begin....
For all the vituperation against A scalers, it is a little remembered fact that the only reason that A scales came to be the envy of the aviation world was because the then pilots and flight engineers stuck together and threatened strike action. When Fern, Tucknott, Morris, Gilroy and Horsting were at top of the AOA the company stood up and took notice! A vote was held at the old Mariners Club over numerous grievances, and the majority result was a mandate for industrial action. Each Captain on the day the action was to start was handed a brown envelope with the instructions from the AOA committee inside, telling him how to carry out his part of the industrial action. Note that I said Captain, in those days it was accepted that ONLY the Captain could shoulder the responsibilty to carry out industrial action, and thus bear the consequences if the Company turned nasty. The result? The DFO marched into the Mariners Club and....capitulated.
The result was the increasing increment A scale payscale and the housing/medical/travel benefits that went with it. Solidarity and an acceptance of the AOA position even by those that voted against the motion made the management back down. It's worth remembering that the company was full of young guys and their families straight out of the various air forces, and Hong Kong was nowhere near the easy place to live it is now.....
So given all this, (easily readable in the HKAOA records if you don't believe that aircrew can act in their own common interest), having stood up to management in far more trying circumstances, why should A scalers reduce the conditions they won for guys who cower when 49 of th0eir colleagues are sacked for' no apparent reason? Or for some bograt just turned up who hasn't got the balls to stand up for himself when his conditions of service change for the worse?
(It is also worth noting a further example of solidarity amongst crew at the time, when a bunch of Captains paid for a fellow pilots mortgage when interest rates had shot so high his pay was less than his mortgage payment........)