Originally Posted by
The500man
Any business will seek to reduce its staffing costs. There are so many people that are/ used to be/ want to be pilots that to get a job, ANY job, they become willing to accept poor conditions/ pay to fly schemes/ lower wages. This is simply supply and demand.
It's really not true that this is discrete to pilots in the airline industry.
The Universities are turning out many graduate engineers and scientists with huge training debts - in the UK typically £30-£40k, not far behind a baby pilot's training debt, and many go years hunting for that job.
Baby pilots have slightly larger debts (gained a bit more quickly) and are employable in less places - but otherwise the picture is pretty similar.
Arguably you could say it is these people that have caused the situation we have now but ultimately it is the number of people that want to fly that makes it possible for aviation employers to set-out conditions as they have done.
Again, or many other professions. Advertise for a scientist (which I do fairly regularly) and you get 60+ applications for each job as well.
As conditions worsen less people should want to or be able to fly as a job, and employers will then need to compete with each other for the best candidates resulting in better conditions etc. This probably won't happen becasuse no matter how bad it gets there are people that still want to fly.
And again, this is true of just about any profession. The reality is that newly minted fATPLs, graduate scientists, people with new business management degrees with no business experience, will always be with us. As will employers who aren't interested in employing people with no experience.
There will always be a few exceptions - you rarely meet an unemployed nurse or science teacher, but those are very rare - pilots are actually pretty representative of the whole job market.
If you ran a business and someone came to you saying they would work for nothing and would pay to train themselves, how much respect would you have for them? If there was a queue of such people what would you do then?
This is exactly the model on which business and political internships run in the US and increasingly the rest of the world. These hungry graduates, prepared to work for nothing, will be the future leaders of world industry - and you'll probably find them in the management side of most airlines these days anyhow.
So again, the airlines really are nothing special.
In other industry's an employer would have to train its own staff to do the job they required be done.
Cobblers. Most employers of educated professionals are taking graduates with £30+k debt, built up over 3-5 years at university, and only doing the final stages of on-the-job (line!) training.
It's only unskilled or semi-skilled jobs nowadays where employers provide the main part of the training. McDonalds, Timsons and the production line jobs in the local factory!
If all aviation employers had to train their own staff they would then be more likely to regard their employee's as an asset and might treat them better in the hope they would stay with them.
Like the armed forces do you mean? The organisations with the world's biggest training budgets have the biggest retention problems. Of course, being blown up or shot at tends to take the temper off the good training and cameraderie!
Making it impossible or impractical to fund your own commercial training might be a way to force employers to do this. I really don't see any other reason for why it would be in their interest to do so.
Your pilots airline paid for by pilots is really a non-starter, but how about a pilots union, where pilots could work together to seek better overall conditions?
Many airlines over the years have been started by pilots - Suckling Airways which became ScotAir is a good example - but don't for a moment believe that pilots alone have even a large percentage of the total skillset needed to run an airline.
G