Originally Posted by
Hindenburg
Careful when you compare European salaries to US.
Usually, European salaries include pension (although crapy), health insurance and unemployment insurance.
In general you can deduct around 40 to 55% from the gross pay to get the net pay. This applies especially to the northern states like Germany, Denmark, Sweden. Applied Tax alone can be up to 43%. UK is much less.
While net salaries in the US might appear huge in number, still medicare or 401K have to be deducted. Taxes are significantly lower tough. Unemployment insurance? What´s that?.
Before I moved to Europe (Scandinavia) I compared my paycheck and expenses with my European wife's paycheck and expenses. Despite the significantly higher tax rate, she got a far better deal. She worked in a non-flying position for SAS and was taxed at about 47% overall. Her compensation included a 20% pension and a private unemployment insurance. Her taxes covered 100% of her health insurance, and because of the education system in Denmark, she had no outstanding student loans or to have to save for the kids education. Even though I had a lower tax rate in the states, I had a 401k contribution (that did not come close to what she had), student loan payments, health insurance premiums and copays for visits and prescriptions. On top of that there were a lot of additional little things like educational supplies and fees for kids activities that my wife never had to pay for because they are all covered under taxes. At the end of the day, my wife had a pretty sizable advantage when it came to disposable income. And because she never had to take out student loans, she had better purchasing power because she had no outstanding debt. On top of that she was guaranteed by law five weeks plus five additional days of annual vacation. So you are correct, it is very hard to make an apples to apples comparison of European compensation and U.S. compensation.
Just as an FYI, Norwegian did recently open a 787 base in Copenhagen. All the pilots there are directly employed by Norwegian, not through an agency. They are unionized, they have a 12% pension, loss of license insurance, supplemental travel insurance, five weeks of vacation. The fact that they have a different employment agreement compared to other Norwegian bases is similar to how other European airlines operate which have different contracts dependent on base and fleet type. Even British Airways has different employment contracts and conditions dependent on whether you are short haul vs. long haul or Heathrow based vs. Gatwick based vs. Manchester based.