In the good old days a BOAC Captain (flying his Imperial Seaplane on a 2 week trip to South Africa) would have a salary and social cache roughly comparable to a High Court Judge .... now we are comparing our trade to salesmen and tube drivers ... where did it go wrong ??
It is basically true that any of us are paid a salary proportional to how easy we are to replace .... that is capitalism. In the extreme the "irreplaceable" football striker is paid a fortune, and the manual/ unskilled labourer a lot less. In between there lies all of us ....
Our T&C's will only improve when the drought happens .... and there are too many jobs for too few experienced pilots ... C'est la vie ..