The point that very few people seem to address is that airlines have never sought 250 hour pilots to sit in the right hand seat. Yes there have always been a very small number of restricted schemes (such as BA/Hamble) that offered a graduate level sponsored entry to a few lucky receipients. The airline provided the cost of training these candidates through an 18-24 month ab-initio training course that led on to a lengthy tailored and mentored programme with the sponsoring airline itself. This then eventually merged into that airlines regular career path. Airlines have always broadly represented the ultimate in career progression for commercial pilots. It doesn't matter if those commercial pilots came from ex-military backgrounds, or other commercial operations, the airlines could pick and choose the best of their source material, and the salaries (and terms and conditions) generally represented both the fact, and the level of experience sought in the candidate.
In recent years the advent of certain low cost carriers brought with it a determination to strip out each and every perception of unnecessary cost. One of the major costs was clearly the operating crew. If they could have stripped out the First Officers seat and simply thrown it in a skip, some of them would have done so in the blink of an eye. Those that didn't would have been forced to start doing so a year or two later! However they couldn't do that, so they were forced to look at the way the whole industry was structured. The regulator simply required that a First Officer was appropriately licenced, type rated, and held a valid first class medical certificate. They did have some serious qualms about inexperienced Captains flying with inexperienced First officers, but that aside there was no other obstacle.
At first this meant that the Right hand seat was open not only to the previous levels of experience required, but to a whole new market of "no/low relevant houred experienced pilots" that were being churned out by the plethora of pilot training "puppy farms" that took advantage of these new opportunities to expand their businesses. So successful were these programmes in supplying low houred First officers to partner airlines that the ex-military and ex-commercial candidates were largely squeezed out of the recuitment drive, unless they themselves were prepared to lower their own salary expectations to the levels now demanded by this newfound glut of supply. Thus the Airline First Officers job, was no longer the same airline job of old, but now more of an industry entry level position. The salaries, terms and conditions started (slowly at first) to turn South, then the decline rapidly accelerated.
Airlines then came under pressure from the continuing lust to drive down costs, coupled with increased competition in the marketplace. Add to this a downturn in the economic cycle, and a self created expectation in the public mind that they could fly anywhere for a headline price of a penny! Indeed some of those 150-200 seats behind the flightdeck door were indeed being sold for a penny. Those that weren't had to fight tooth and nail, along with sales of Kit Kats and other anciliary items, to provide the margins between profit and loss. However a few airlines quickly cottoned on to the fact that there was one seat on board that was a potential goldmine?
You've got it! The one forward right of the flightdeck door. People were tripping over themselves to pay six figure sums for the opportunity to then pay £30,000 more to sit here. Better still they were, in some cases, prepared to pay for line training and all the other costs that an airline had previously associated with its own input costs. Indeed each and every risk fell to the candidate. Those that stayed the course would accept the huge reductions in salaries and terms and conditions. Those that didn't stay the course, left to be replaced by another total risk encumbered candidate. Indeed as long as there wasn't a public relations disaster this was even better than throwing the seat in a skip. Far better than those airlines could ever have originally imagined.
So, candidates were seduced by an expectation of a job with terms and conditions that had existed for experienced career climbers a few years earlier. They were then sold the promise on the back of cheap credit, selection interviews, uniforms and all the trappings of gloss and glamour for a job that (if it actually materialized,) would of course reflect the new reality that they were in fact a big market of bob-a-job pilots with barely 4 times the experience level of a PPL! Many of the early candidates did indeed fare well out of these programmes, but like all bubbles, they eventually burst. This one started to show signs of significant distortion just as a major global financial crisis came along to accelerate the whole process.
Previously there was a career ladder where the job of airline pilot was reached via the top rungs. This process has lowered the job of airline pilot to the bottom rungs. As a result (and economy notwithstanding,) many of these First Officer positions are basic entry level and the terms and conditions will continue to reflect that fact for as long as it continues to exist. The airline managements hope this will be for a long long time. Indeed some of them have already started to look at the other seat for all the opportunities that affords. I am afraid that anybody who believes this is all going to suddenly reverse itself in a year or two, is simply not looking at what is actually happening. What has been happening gradually for some considerable time, and what is likely to happen in the short to medium term future.
If regulation is forced to raise the terms and conditions back to the top rungs of this career ladder, there is precious little interest in many of you 250-1500 hour pilots. If that fails to happen, you can expect the value of the job to reflect the quantity and experience level of applicants, and that has a considerable downside.