Hot Wings - personally, I agree with you regarding the huge pay awards made to certain airline CEOs. As I said earlier, it's a team effort - and that applies from the top down. Given that the buck should stop with the CEO, I'd say that they should do what Herb Kelleher has done on occasions and have nil pay and profit share. Now that's putting your money where your mouth is!
I'm currently in Atlanta, and had a very interesting discussion this evening in a restaurant near the airport with several DL pilots about their recent pay award; their working conditions and their external business interests.
In my opinion, productivity should be the yardstick against which performance is judged. Look at the Southwest (and Ryanair) people - they manage many more rotations (and correspondingly hours in the air) than their equivalents in the likes of BA. FR crews are, apparently, amongst the best paid crews today. I have no problems with that at all - they work damn hard for it! However, there are other carriers where that isn't the case - especially on long haul flights. How much time, in each flight, is actually spent hands-on flying the aircraft? Not a lot. Pilots today are largely systems monitors - and to state otherwise is naive. The safety of the aircraft, frankly, rests with the cabin crew and the air traffic controllers - both of whom are remarkably poorly paid.
Like it or not, we are in an economic downturn/recession and that means that all costs need to be cut to the bone.
And for those of you out there that think that they can blackmail their employer into caving in to excessive pay demands, I have two words:
Aerolineas Argentinas.
There, the pilots thought that they could force the management into paying them more; so they struck. A couple of days later, the company was out of cash - so it folded. Those pilots went from having a job (albeit one that was not, in their opinion, paying enough) to having no job at all. Rather more seriously, none of their colleagues have jobs, either.
Do you really want that on your conscience?