One can make whatever excuses you want about first year pay but the reality is that ultimately you get - as coworkers - what you as a company are able to recruit. Expecting someone to go through training and the first year taking a $30k cut in pay to NOT affect the quality of the pool you are drawing from is just silly. But expecting that anyone who does go through that to feel strongly that he or she owes any loyalty to the people above who LET him/her be cr@pped upon in the contract or in the pilot group as a whole isn’t silly, it’s stupid. You want a pilot group where it’s every man for himself? That’s what you’ll get.

I don’t care that it’s better than what you had, or that when you were a newbie FO you had to push back the aircraft yourself, uphill, after you did the walk around, IN THE SNOW, surviving on snack basket leftovers, and you were glad for the chance. Because things are changing. The demographics are changing. Some regionals and a lot of ACMIs are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

If that’s where you want your newbies to come from, keep treating them like dirt. You’ll get your wish.