Lawrie,
After pursuing a career and starting out with 150-200 hours in the early turbulent 90's, I've seen my fair share while embarking on my career dream.
Voting down the latest EBA was personally hard thought and was happy with the initial outcome when voted down, but lost for words when my union signed off on practically the same EBA, and somehow enabling current non-EBA pilots to vote as part of company "buy-out" to get it over the line,
I lost my faith in the collective...
I feel for the current F/O generation within our struggling company. Really good guys, and now battling to keep their right to seniority being circumvented by these 457 visa's, and direct entry captains, (yes many exceed the OM1 command requirements, as well as those with less than OM1 req's, but exceed company requirements not met by most direct entry captains). The flight deck chatter, (on the whole), used to be so positive and easy going, is now being consistently eroded by talk of direct entry commands, by-pass of seniority, and I wonder what I will be chatting about tomorrow when our own union had pretty much endorsed further direct entry fella's from SA.
"They'll be direct-entry captains with type-rated experience and they'll be able to go into vacancies and provide training opportunities.....
Need I add how many currently employed experienced captains we presently have, that could fill any training role if a company FSO requesting EOI for training vacancies, was produced tomorrow would be easily filled.... disgraceful and disappointing