Pay for responsibility.
As one who spent many thousands of hours as a Flight Engineer and, in my pre-civil airline life, drove large passenger coaches to supplement my wage I find the line of "pay us for our responsibility" a bit difficult to reconcile. To me, whether flying in a B747 full of punters or taking 48 people on an overnight coach trip the responsibility factor was the same. In each instance the most important life on board was mine and my avoidance of risk reflected that. Certainly most pilots could become proficient in driving a coach and it is likely that most coach drivers may not be able to become pilots. The risks, however, are much greater in the case of a professional coach driver than those of an airline pilot, or at least statistics would point to that being the case. Does anyone suggest that a coach driver should be paid a similar wage to that paid to an airline pilot? I suspect not. We all have the capacity to accept or decline the terms of employment offered. It is not good for anyone to accept low pay and then spend a lot of time and energy bitching about it.