As long as there people with a "f*** you Jack, I'm ok" mentality...yep you're right...the industry will continue to decline.
Ah Ok so you are going to turn down a jet job in order to stand on principle, are you? Rather fly your GA POS and spend your life in crappy places blaming everyone but yourself for your lack of progression?
The reality is that every slot that Jetstar has will be easily filled, probably oversubscribed by 500%. These people aren't shafting you or anybody else, and they aren't setting out to harm the industry. They are valuing their services at a certain level, and that's all. Being smart people, they know that their overall prospects are dramatically better than any truckie, train driver, or whatever. They also know that in this climate, having a job at all in aviation is a bonus, and now is definitely not the time to be haggling over pay.
And since you brought up 1989, that is indeed a salutary lesson. The pilots valued their services at a certain level, and pretty much everyone else disagreed... and look what happened. Now ask yourself if that was the smartest move, in terms of preserving pay and conditions? And no, I don't want to get into a fight over '89, few people here can think clearly about it anyway.
The sooner some of you lose the 1950's UK union rhetoric, the better. Those days are long gone.