Hear hear.
When I started looking for work in the mid nineties I was also advised to bide my time and don't work for free - some of the best advice I ever had. It wasn't easy financially but in the long term it meant I was saddled with much less debt (was a self improver). Take the long term view, help us more established blokes fight to improve T's and C's without you giving the airlines the opportunity to ignore us because they have a huge pool of "willing to pay" recruits. With time we will be able to recover from the mess we're in at the moment - but we need the collaboration of the freshly qualified guys in order to do so.
As an aside, the experience you will gain and the laughs you will have working your way up through the instructing, para dropping, air taxi etc route will be worth it's weight in gold and will make you far more valuable a recruit to the decent outfits out there. Just my humble opinion.