This thread really mirrors all the angst amoungst pilots today, things are getting worse across the board and have done so for a few years now. However, over my 25 years in the industry, I have seen the pendulum swing both ways. As a hard up Flying Instructor, I was appalled to hear of FI's paying flying clubs to sit in the Left hand seat (pay to fly A320 FOs wind me up just as much), and when I got my IR there were 180 unemployed 737 drivers on the the books at the Professional Pilots Register at LGW! So the only hope was to buy a turbo-prop rating and try to sell myself! OOPS spot the hypocrite! Well, lets face it, we all are when the chips are down.
So at the moment, everything is **HITE, but it will change. Cast your mind back to 1999-2001, everything was booming and the airlines couldn't recruit crew fast enough, on proper T&C's too. That time will return again, no doubt in a slightly modifeid form, but return it will. What is imperative IMHO is that those of us on good T&Cs absolutely protect them (nod to BALPA here) so that when times get good again, T&C's are brought up again to the highest possible level.
With regard to Pay to Fly cadets, even this has had its day in the more reputable airlines. Where I am, word is that future cadets will go to a prop operator for a time before joining the jet fleet. I suspect that 3 damaged aircraft in 3 years have given the board senior management (when they finally found out about it) a few sleepless nights!! But don't think that cadets are going to disappear, the old self - improver route is effectively dead, and the RAF/NAVY/AAC ranks are much smaller than they were, so the throughput of retirees is much reduced. In-House cadetships are the very antithesis of cost control for modern management, so outsourced cadets it must be!! Ah, only afew years to retirement, thank God.