Disagree with your there aztruck
Why should pilots, who are in charge of hundreds of lives each week, be paid poorly for their job? Why should pilots, as a group, not aspire to a job which can be described as a career? Why do you think 100k for a captain is so ridiculous? Lawyers, accountants, bankers (not rhyming slang), doctors, and any number of other similarly highly skilled and regarded professions pay their professionals 100k + regularly, and apart from doctors any of those guys who have a bad day can go home for a glass of wine. If you have a bad day you'll be providing the world's biggest barbeque for whatever village or town you happen to plough into.
Management would love pilots to be on minimum wage, have no T&C's and have no limitations. They see us a high paid help (I would suggest the same about the managers). If they want to fly 170 people into Zurich on a rainy, !!!!!ty day with windshear, cloud to minimums and the other regular winter occurrences, they are welcome to try but I have found that management nerve often falters when it comes to actually showing some balls (also, of course, they wouldn't know how to move the seat in the flight deck or 'pointy end', to the uninitiated). They would also have a tough time understanding anything that I'm saying. I tend to find that supreme ignorance is difficult to overcome.
Management, if you are not one of them already, have no comprehension that doing our job well is what keeps the reputation of their airline, what keeps passengers calm during absurd weather conditions, what keeps 'their' (I use the word sparingly) $70 million aeroplane from becoming aforementioned barbeque. They, for their part, are welcome to keep their executive leather chair, mahogany desk and painful egos, but I expect them to respect the people who are the only two accountable for the passengers who pay their salaries. And if they don't I will fight to keep the T&C's which you seem to think are ill-deserved.
I have never disembarked and heard any of the passengers saying 'thank god for the financial director, he did a great job there'.
Yes some folk pay more, and seniority often creates ludicrous differentials, akin to those NHS consultants who turn up twice a month in return for vast salaries, swan off in their Bentleys, leaving the Junior doctors to drown in a sea of casualties.
Can you just clarify your point there? Do you mean the consultant, who started off as a junior doctor, and earned the crappy wages working the long hours doesn't deserve what he has achieved over his career, or that the junior doctor should be paid better and given a better lifestyle (T&C's, I suppose you could call them)?
Of course, if the NHS looked at itself and got rid of a percentage of its incompetent managers who, having no idea of what a hospital needs to run efficiently are of 'limited' use, instead of selfishly protecting its support staff (the non-operations staff, that is...), they would be able to hire more doctors, pay them the money they deserved and give them a good quality of life.
Of course the same goes for the MoD, schools, social care, the list goes on and includes airlines.
Rant over. I may have gone off on a tangent at some point, but I feel better now
