Seniority is well and truly dead in CX. They are currently recruiting several ex KA STCs onto the minibus as DECs.

Are they really, or is that just an excuse? With pilot salaries and benefits arguably going backwards over the longer term, the real beneficiaries of such a system are the senior executives and shareholders.

"arguably"

I compare CX COS with mates at QF or Air NZ that like me joined their carrier more than a couple of decades ago. There's around an 80% swing between how much they've gone up and I've gone down.

Factor in that the f*cked Hong Kong housing market has seen gains of about a quarter of what you'd have got in Canada or Oz or NZ over the same time period............

I find your line of argument ignorant with all due respect. I and many others did not "voluntarily" sign anything. We were blackmailed. You ignore the fact that the old "contract" expired simply because one party gave notice. Turns out it wasn't worth the paper it was written on.
Your phantasy of "nobody signing it" is neither helpful nor logic. It's frankly cynical. Anything can be changed anywhere if by some magic spell everybody would act in union. There would be no war, no poverty, no global warming, no dictators. It's not helpful to dream about a non-existent ferry tale society.
The company acted as they did because they could digest people leaving as a consequence. That is the reality. A durable contract in the true meaning of the word and as stipulated by yourself serves as protection for the individual employee. Where was that protection when it was needed? We never had a proper contract, that is the sad truth, it was an illusion.
If you are honest to yourself, you simply have to acknowledge that. As the title of this thread suggests, the cost of starting at the bottom can be very high. Just because you had a way out, a plan B, the right age, a helpful passport, no mortgage etc doesn't make you a better or smarter person.

I agree, the seniority system is much beloved by employers - they are virtual handcuffs for senior crews.

How else can you manage career progress transparently? Certainly not with an opaque “merit” based one. There will be many and varied interpretations of the word merit.

And if you are honest with yourself you can acknowledge that you made a decision and direct entry captains over the top of you is a consequence of that so don’t blame anyone else.

Happens all the time in other industries too. Senior person decides they no longer want the bull****, so join another firm in a much junior and less stressful role. This guy sounds sensible. Turn up at QF as a SO, monitor flights during cruise, have a good life. Doesn’t need to impress the neighbours any more

After COVID, a lot of over 50’s have retired early/ switched to ‘barista retirement’

True, as well as all of the ex CX Captains that resigned during Covid.

At least the CX Captains get DOJ and L4 pay, the KA STC's will be on L1 with a reset DOJ and loss of all benefits.

You see, this has been the problem. Asianexpress is happy that one group of employees or soon to be colleagues are going to get screwed for their benefits. When did these sort of people join a once great airline, ...about the the time the cadet scheme was introduced and sycophancy became the norm.
I don't want my family even flying on CX anymore.

I don't see any posts of Asian Express auggesting what you are accusing him?

Big difference to re-hire someone who got fired as opposed to someone who quit, at least in my opinion. No issue with the former, the latter not so sure.

you literally signed it! you had a contract. and signed it away. Don’t waffle. It is contrary to HK law to be forced to sign a new ‘contract’ you are simply weak and deserve all that comes your way

Primitive, uneducated and rude. I will ignore you in the future, "debate" with someone else.

And also wrong. We didn’t actually sign away anything, we were all essentially terminated with 3 months notice. Contemporarily we were offered the choice of either signing a new ‘contract “ (actually mostly a policy document, to be modified at their whim) or the door. At the end of 2020, with the covid crisis deepening and no jobs anywhere, very few could afford to do anything but comply and sign the new “contract”.

But there was no signing away anything: the old contract was gone, whether you chose to sign the new one or not.

You’re right, no-one can be forced to sign anything, but equally an employer can at anytime simply give an entire workforce 3 months notice while simultaneously offering a new, inferior deal. Apparently nothing in the labour law here forbids that. If they chose their time well, when that workforce is most vulnerable, many will have no choice but to sign.

for a second there I thought you wrote they were recruiting onto the crew shuttle… the pay and conditions for those drivers is probably more stable!

I think everyone including yourself was terminated with the notice period. The only difference was the KA guys were offered a payment in lieu of notice and a redundancy.

However all you got was an inferior contract and no notice or redundancy. Your simplistic understanding of employment law might make you feel you were retained, but realistically you signed up to an inferior contract after being terminated.

CX rolled the dice on all the pilots, knowing how many would cling to the job regardless of conditions. The contract was as strong as the resolve of the pilot group, so I suggest you do some research before proclaiming what the contract was worth.

"United we stand, divided we fall" probably the best adage

Kaboy, maybe next time you jump into a discussion you take the effort to read through the posts to understand the context. You condescending tone is misplaced. I was commenting on re-hiring CX CN's who quit during the pandemic and are now re-hired as opposed to Ex-Dragon who never had the choice, got fired and are now re-hired to (interestingly) worse conditions than the former group.

To your" lack of unity" theory behind the successful transition to COS, well that is not very helpful. You would have no dictators, no war, famines, no global warming and no World Cup in Qatar if people would willing to come together and act reasonably and united. It's a wet dream. Humans don't t work like that, and again, if we had had a contract worthy of the term you would not have needed imagined magic unity.By the way, hiring out of seniority was anyway always possible, there is of course no legal way to stop a company in HK doing so. Fact is we never had a contractual protection for anything, just market forces in our favour. Once those forces turned against us and they could not care less if people quit, they acted as they did.

klinger, standing united comes down to the individual first. Individuals like you that capitulate are the individuals that don’t unite and back your own argument.