Exactly. The whole paying your dues is bunk. You'll never be able to accurately quantify it nor normalize it for differing labor conditions. The logical conclusion to the argument is working for free and still not satisfying someone's definition of "having paid your dues". Junior labor does not owe senior labor anything just like the market doesn't owe anybody a job. So put the pay your dues argument to rest already. The market is not sensible to moral adjudications, get over it.

That said, if people want to have a career where one can sustain a household they have to stop taking the job for 20K. In the absence of that, things will never get better. Sometimes you're just priced out of a job and that's life. I know I can't afford to take on a flying job for 20K for a year, let alone an aggregate decade of under-compensation. Tough luck. But people's unwillingness to accept that circumstance indirectly contributed to colgan and it infuriates me. We need to cut off the student loan racket. I guarantee you first year FO pay goes up the second you restrict the availability of debt to the zero to hero crowd. Just an idea and it will also help the general labor market as well as it will have the same net effect upon the current devaluation of the undergraduate college degree. Just an idea to fix the problem.