While NSF and the ever diminishing legions of "Pilots entitled to brain surgeon salaries"folk whinge and wring their hands at our Airline business model, may I suggest they are in the wrong job. They should have joined the Post office.
That must be an easy comment to make if this career is a bit of a hobby rather than your full time source of income. The root cause of this wholesale slaughter of the terms and conditions is the filling of the right hand seat with 250 hour pilots who are either prepared to pay for the privilege or are happy to accept T&C's that are frankly commensurate with their experience. That airlines take advantage of this complete inertia on the part of the regulator isn't really their fault.
Nobody should be sitting in either seat on an airliner until they at least hold a full ATPL. Then The T&C's would reflect the true market rate, and there would be less of this nonsense. In the USA legislation is now going through the house to ensure that is the case. It needs to happen here as well. Unfortunetaly it will probably take Sky News images of a smoking hole for it to happen, just as it did in the USA.