I wasn't really talking about how they treat their pilots. It's more of a commentary on the whole business model. I didn't mean for it to be taken so seriously and become such a topic of interest in this thread.
I hated being asked to lie outright to customers. I think as pilots we are in one of the few professions that allows us to maintain a high level of integrity (if we so choose) so when an operator asked us to lie to a customer I found it uncomfortable. I especially hated it when sales people would throw the crew under the bus to hide the lies they told to sell a trip...."sure we can make it non stop."
Aircraft owners would corner the pilots and try to dig for information so you never really knew what to say. You just had to play dumb all the time.
But these were small annoyances. The margins were so tight and the competition so high sometimes they just had no choice I suppose. Flying charter was usually the most fun I ever had as a pilot. Even corporate jobs can get boring flying the same people to the same locations and staying in the same hotels but charters always allowed you to mix it up a bit. I also never really had problems with pay...some people did though as it was never the same from pilot to pilot.