Firestorm, Barden (in particular, although most others also!)
I doff (sp?) my hat to you, sirs. Both absolutely accurate, articulate and sadly showing how industry has declined in that the view you have espoused is so minority.
I spent 15 years working in industry before [trying to] career change in the last three years. Having had that amount of management experience, it's laughable how easy it would be to divide the pilot body and impose whatever the hell you want on them. Collective agreement from within the pilot body is absolutely necessary, perhaps more so now than ever, if things are to remain in stasis, let alone improve. But sadly I don't think it will happen.
I menitoned in another thread, I'm just not sure what BALPA does. This isn't to say I think they're not doing stuff, but I don't see evidenced the positive results....indeed, the only things that seem to be happening is the downward spiral....as Firestorm said, surely when SSTR first came around none of the existing crews were all for it, so why wasn't it stamped on there and then. What about line training? Without wishing to go tangentially off and hijack the thread about BALPA, all I see is training costs going up and up for new entrants, SSTR and line training becoming the norm and nothing being done, whilst older pilots almost go on a witch hunt for anyone that won't sign up to BALPA straight away....It would be a much easier sell if there were obvious victories directly attributable to them easily viewable. Collective protection of the industry is now needed more than ever, yet it seems perhaps further away than ever as people seek more and more to protect what they personally have.
Sad.