I think it has more to do with the fact that some of the pilots in the company, "experienced ones", can see that the long term future of the profession is shaped this way, and they see it as a degradation of future T&C's for all in the end.
They would be slow not to, since there has been an overall degradation of industry wide T&C's over the last 15 years. Working for one of the two largest European pioneers of "Low cost" air transportation your TRI would have had a good view of this evolution. When he wasn't "slamming" his company to people he had just met, and were presumably paying him for the services he was able to moonlight, as an adjunct to his employment. He would presumably have had a good understanding of the business environment he operated in.
"Low cost" imported a revolution in the way airlines operated. They imported the idea from the USA and added their own respective Irish and Greek (an irony not lost,) flavours to the formula. "Low cost" meant stripping out the fat wherever it could be found, and wherever it was allowed. Single fleet bulk aircraft purchases. Minimum airport and handling charges. Maintenance and safety was regulated. Fuel was cartel price fixed. The next big ticket item was labour costs. They studied the rule book, and played what was to become an extremely depressed labour market. They counted on the fact that "cheap as a pair of jeans" and "I might moan to high heaven but I don't care as long as I can fly for £1" would be a succesful formula......And they were right!
In parallel to what was happening in the rest of the economy, final salary pensions evaporated. Welfare provisions were either torn up or cut to the bone. Salaries were cut, or the qualifying working hours raised to effect a cut. Experience became an unnecessary commodity in the right seat, and to a greater or lesser extent in the left seat as well. The result was that these new "low cost" airlines were growth industries in the face of global recession. Not just growth industries, but profitable growth industries.
Legacy carriers from the smallest to the largest were forced to adapt their own business models to survive in the face of this competition. Some did, some didn't. The survivors were usually faced with cutting back their staff numbers, or effectively doing the same by merging and consolidating with other companies in order to survive.
Pilots (and a lot of them) were forced to either accept the new realities and seek out work where it existed, or move to the growth regions of the Middle and Far East. The writing was on the wall over a decade ago for all but the most myopic or narcoleptic of daydreamers!
Couple this with a few other realities. Retirement ages were raised during this same period by 5 and in some cases 10 years. This took pressure off the experience base in the left seat as Captains naturally took advantage of the opportunities to counter their own recession induced realities. Labour supply exponentially began to outstrip demand. Cost advantage margins began to shrink as competition caught up, and the "Lo-Co's" had to explore deeper wells to maintain the advantage essential to their own growth and long term health. Fuel, maintenance and safety was still too difficult to touch, so it was back to the old favourites.
Then we come to the bit that this forum is all about..."wanabees." Well here the news wasn't all bad. Apprentices from specific sources, were placed in the right seat as "Cadets." This became a growth industry in an environment demanding cost savings. There was no shortage of well qualified and well trained candidates, and throughout the last decade and a half, the supply has grown to such an extent, that I regularly come on here and point out just where those opportunities lie. It isn't something a lot of people want to hear, much less believe, but it remains an accurate observation of reality. There are jobs for cadets. There will be a growth in jobs for cadets as the economy improves. The infrastructure has been built and invested in, to provide for that growth.
What never fails to amaze me is that although we have been saying this here for many years. Although we have been shouting from the rooftops about the realities of this market, there are still people like yourself who simply refuse to accept these realities and seem bewildered and surprised when they are repeated. I see in your last post you stated:
Now from what I have understood, CTC contracts do not promise that Easy or any other company will pay the TR.
How many times have we said that there are
no promises. There simply can be
no promises. These are commercial companies operating in a Capitalist economy. They only create demand when there is a need. The FTO's depend on the airlines to pass on their graduates. They have customers at both ends of the spectrum. They don't create the demand at the airline placement level, their airline partners do that. Similarly they don't set the terms and conditions for airline placements, each customer airline sets their own.
When you gave up the job with the Tigers a few years back, did you honestly believe that these very apparant, established (by then) and real evolutions in the market, were not going to affect you? Did you think that once you had aquired the cheapest route to a CPL/IR, terms and conditions would revert back to the legacy scales that were offered to pilots with ten times your experience even when they did exist? Did you think "low cost" meant everything but your labour? If you did, you were naive and ignorant, because plenty of "experienced" pilots were happy to spell out the realities to you. In any event you can take some consolation in the fact you had plenty of like minded company.
For some
wanabees it is not all gloom and doom. There are areas of opportunity for those with both the wit and luck to find them. There are airline opportunities for cadets, if those aspirants are careful, well researched, and also lucky. What there aren't are guarantees, promises, or the right to gainful employment.
I have said this before (many times) but am happy to repeat it.
easyjet, whatever you may think of it, was a company that kept the flow of new recruits to the airline industry running, when it had all but dried up in most other sectors of the market. These were "apprenticeships" to a number of aspirant very low experienced airline pilot
wanabees. As a leading exponent of the whole "low cost" philosophy, they took advantage of the market to exploit the cost savings open to them. That might not seem very nice to you or I, but it was the very nature of the beast itself.
As other companies now come back into the market, demand might cause those T&C's to improve. Just as likely however, is that it will cause other companies to re-evalute their own potential cost savings? Supply and demand will set the market price as it usually does. Unfortunetaly, with supply potential from the "experienced" pilot market, competing with pricing at the "apprenticeship" level, I wouldn't draw any short term optimism on this score.
Truckflyer, or
TigermagicJohn or whatever you call yourself this week, You need to wake up and smell the coffee! This is an industry that owes you nothing. Rather like those Tigers, it will chew you up and spit you out if you dont afford it caution, respect, and an honest acceptance of the nature of the beast. It isn't what you think it is. It isn't what you want it to be, and frankly, in many ways it never has been.
You are blinkered and narrowly focused if you believe cadets, or CTC or
easyjet are to blame for this situation. You can highlight your own scapegoats, but it will make absolutely no difference to the realities.