oh dear oh dear oh dear.
Safety, bottom line here is that you made a bad snap judgement and got called for it. You don't even have the grace to acknowledge that. Your response is to come out being frankly, bloody rude.....or is it just you had a second bowl of stupid for breakfast today?
Let me try and answer your wonderful prose such that you may understand, as clearly you don't understand reasoned argument
"know it all uni kid".
Hardly. It's called "providing context for your opinion". I'm nothing special, but I do have management experience. Would you call a 20000 hour captain "know it all" for offering an opinion on aviation....no, didn't think so. And, pray tell, at which point did I say anything about uni having ANYthing to do with it? Oh, that's right - I didn't...just thought you'd take a cheap shot, didn't you? As an aside, I'm guessing you didn't got to uni....often betrayed by the sneering attitude to those that did....I'm guessing the words "I went to university of life, din' I *sniff*" are lurking not too far behind...
"feels hurt cos BALPA didn't do anything for him"
. Not in the slightest. BALPA owe me nothing at all. Nor do I seek anything from them. What I was saying is that perhaps fighting for those at the lower end of the food chain, would stop the rot at the top of the chain. If you really can't understand that concept, then there is no help for you. It is rather too late for me to benefit from any fight any organisation may choose to have in favour of those at the lower end - yet I still think it worthwhile...it's called foresight, it may help preserve conditions if I were to eventually attain a command...try it sometime, it's illuminating. Further worthy of note - if people see an organisation actively defending their industry, they're more likely to believe it can help them. This would probably help "sell" the cause to those, for example, in Ryanair right now.
"Bad management is at least as destructive as a bad union if not more so. And another thing before you go and whistle elsewhere, even a bad union, even if misguided, was trying to improve things for everyone. Bad management were only trying to line their own pockets"
. Well, good grief! An almost accurate statement! Yes, "bad management" is at least as damaging as unions - no, actually, there is nothing as corrosive as bad management. But that's never been in question. Neither has the benefit of a "good" union. But something you seem to have missed - at no point have I said that unions are bad. The only, ONLY point I made that could even close be construed to relating to "bad" unions is that historically sometimes unions have to understand that - as per the Thomson example - you CAN'T preserve the status quo and some unions are bad at doing this - pushing a business into more pressure.
So no. Despite your best efforts to imply things that I didn't say (I am a member of BALPA, I don't think they're bad - although I think they could do more, I don't think they owe "me" or any other newbie anything) you've totally failed to grasp the concepts here.
The reason I posted this thread was to start a discussion around what [BALPA] could do to, that would encourage those undecided to join. What they could or perhaps SHOULD do to help the industry as a whole. To discuss why they're not worth joining. any/all of the above. Instead, I get barely literate insults from someone that clearly has never sat in the seat of management and had to understand the very unique challenges that brings.