As entertaining as some of the name calling is, if you take away the emotion and the search for the highest piece of ground to plant the morality flag on, you are left with the three basic tenets of a marketplace. Supply, demand and regulation. Any commercial entity has to set the price of its product in accordance with the influence these three things have on its business. A business will only ever survive on its own, if it can turn a profit. If it consistently fails to do this it dies. Business, just as life, is all about survival.
Fish in a pond will live quite happily with each other as long as there is a plentiful supply of food. Some of the fish will get bigger and greedier, some will inevitably fall by the wayside. However once the food supply starts to dry up the fish will become much more predatory in nature in order to survive. The big fish will eat the little fish. Some of the little fish will adapt their size advantage to survive in the niches that the big fish cannot reach. Then the older and weaker big fish become vulnerable to the younger and fitter big fish. Some of the smaller ones are still surviving by the food that drops from these feeding frenzies into their own niches.
Regulation comes in the form of the pond keeper who manages the pond so that there is sufficient variety and control to keep the balance healthy.
Airlines and particularly aggressive new airlines see regulation as a restriction that significantly raises their input costs. Fuel is one of the most regulated and distorted markets that has ever been created. Many of the other input costs are also subject to regulatory control. This means finding cost reductions wherever the opportunity arises. Labour is one of the major input costs. As airline flying was always generally seen as the pinnacle of the aviation industry as far as as pilots were generally concerned, and indeed still is, it could afford to be selective and demanding in the type of recruits it would appoint. Salaries reflected the levels of experience required. For the largest carriers virtually all of their input came from either the military or from other airlines. There was a market that pilots utilized to achieve their aspirations. Certainly there was the "Hamble factor" but that was a highly selective full sponsorship programme that provided a limited input to 2 previous state owned carriers. On top of this the market was to some extent regulated by the unions themselves who sought to set a standard that would ensure a good market price for their members and the industry generally.
Over the last 10-15 years the "Hamble factor" has been exploited by commercial organistations by virtue of the fact it exists to be exploited. Schools sprang up with tie ins to specific airlines, providing them with a low cost low experience to fill the right seat. That was later expanded to turn much of this industry into a factory, where applicants paid huge sums of cash to buy their basic licence coupled with a qualified promise of an airline pilots job at the end of it. Now half of the flight deck labour cost had been significantly reduced, eliminated or even reversed into a profit centre. The regulator did nothing, so that market flourished.
On the other side of the flight deck, mandatory retirement ages were raised from 55 to 60 and then on to 65. Pilots set to retire on healthy pensions, could now do so safe in the knowledge that they could boost their own income well beyond anything ever envisaged by either taking a job at another airline or indeed staying put at their own. Some airlines saw this as an opportunity to reduce their own labour cost base, since the addition of these reduced sums was still a huge boost to the individuals own income. You certainly can't blame individuals for taking full advantage of the opportunites this afforded any more than you can blame the companies who sought commercial advantage by the practice.
The problem here is that the market needs better regulation to ensure that the right hand seat is not filled with 200 hour pilots buying a vanity publishing lifestyle for themselves. Likewise it worries senior pilots who seek to protect their own terms and conditions when their own demand is being eroded by part time second income pilots and those for whom the industry is more of a hobby than a primary source of income.
If an airline can satisfy its own demand by offering say 20K for a Captain and 10K for a First Officer then unfortunetaly by definition that becomes the market rate. Others will either have to match it, or operate at a labour cost disadvantage. Once matched the advantage is lost, and some method will need to be sought to again reduce costs.
Regulation to require airline First Officers operating an aircraft over a certain weight needs to be introduced that sets a miminum experience level of a full ATPL and 1500 hours. You can add to that whatever you deem necessary by way of additional training or courses to achieve the required standard. What it does however is remove a huge chunk of the "vanity publishing" market that many airlines are now capitalising on. As for over 55's working on with pension income as a buffer, that arose as a result of legislative changes and naturally people would take advantage of it wherever they could. Over the course of the next 10 years or so the effects of that will naturally disappear.
I am sorry that I have gone on a bit, but it is only to lend colour to the picture. In summary the Supply and demand factors are still what sets the market price of our labour. It is the regulation that has been allowed to evaporate enabling the distortions that are now evident in the whole industry. Unfortunetaly I expect it is going to get a lot worse before it improves, and that improvement may be a long time coming.