Answer this - when flying New York to LA what is the average pilot doing?
I'm only a member of the SLF brigade but I know darn well you can ask the same question about ANY job.
For example, how about "What is the average airline CEO doing all day?".
The answer is most likely "sitting in an office drinking coffee, reading emails and telling underlings to do reports". A very small proportion of his time is spent actually making critical business decisions.
However, the big difference is that when the CEO gets it wrong, he can file for bankruptcy, blame his failures on the unions and probably walk away with his contractual "golden parachute". When a pilot gets it wrong, there's a potential for the people he has taken responsibility for dying. Even if it doesn't go that far, you only need read this forum to see that one bad decision out of millions of good ones can abruptly end a pilot's career--with no such golden parachute.
In any case, arguing that other staff members generate revenue but pilots are just a cost is simply wrong. As SLF, when I buy an airline ticket it's to get me from point A to point B. As such, the pilots, the rest of the operational staff, the airplane itself and the fuel are far more involved in generating the revenue from my ticket than anybody at head office. The reality is that the whole company is involved in generating revenue...and arguing that pilots are a pure cost is simply foolish.
....my take as SLF anyhow.