Next time you're in the terminal pick up a copy of Naomi Klein's No Logo and read the chapter entitled "No Jobs". There are worrying parallels between the trend toward McJobs in mainstream businesses and the pilot employment market.
Most "industrial" companies are increasingly reliant upon "outsourced" manpower, in other words; temps. The benefit for a company like Microsoft in having the majority of it's employees on temporary contracts is that it has no obligation to offer (or honour) long-term contracts, holiday pay or benefits like pensions and health insurance. They pay the employment agency a fixed fee for a service, in this case manpower, delivered at an hourly or daily rate. The employment agency in turn benefits from it's legal status as an intermediary and thus has no obligation to pay holidays, sickness cover, medical or pensions for it's "clients", in this case the workers. Thus the agencies' overhead is low so the temps they provide are cheaper for the companies than real employees would be and there is no incentive to create REAL JOBS.
Now compare this way of working with wet-leasing. Not all that different is it? This is especially true when you look at recent deals like Virgin's dry-lease out/wet-lease in deal with AAI. Where did AAI add value in that deal? By operating Virgin's own aircraft more cheaply that VS could. And how did they do that? By having a much, much lower cost base and the principle lever they use to lower their cost base is to reduce the roles of all operational staff to "McJobs", i.e. jobs offering no security, no long-term prospects and no benefits all of which would have the effect of making their employees (sorry, contractors) just as expensive as Virgin's.
Klein goes so far as to suggest that providers of McJobs go out of their way to discourage workers from staying and gain seniority as well as discouraging them from forming unions. I can say from first hand experience that this is not the case at AAI, however the formula they have hit upon does have the potential to make fundamental changes for the profession of flying.
Just a thought, figured it would give us something to talk about.