Originally Posted by
ToiletDuck
This is such a blanket statement that doesn't always work. Ask a doctor why they spent years making nothing. Different circumstances. When I started chasing this career is was prior 9/11 where the game was different. Sure crappy wages still existed at the regionals but the industry was booming like never before and pilots were making good wages with nice work rules at that point in time. I took a job knowing I was going to make so little because in the environment at the time it was part of "joining the club" to become an airline pilot where after those first few years things would be completely different. Since then I've see terrorist attacks that grounded aircraft and led to furloughs followed by a recession that's doing the same thing again where people are still living on cut wages and benefits with no clear future in sight. Things have changed drastically since most of us started.
The problem with that argument is that there are boatloads of people
right now waiting on the outside, in the environment you self-admit to be eroded and further declining, chumping at the bit to apply to these de facto fast food joints for a chance at a seniority number and a french fried dream. These people have NO reasonable expectation to attain the long-term compensation, work rules and lifestyle you argue you got yourself in the game for pre-9/11. The reality is that these people will make the EXACT same argument you are making for why they are willing to accept such hardship, and that's just disingenuous, because they KNOW the score. That they may try to push forth some cop-out "oh it's gonna get better" is just optimism-bias talking. Effectively, you can't have the cake and eat it too. They've been served.
You can't be the pre-9/11 guy saying "oh well things were different then" sitting right next to the 2007 new-hire who's using the EXACT SAME argument. Like the 'stache sporting dude in the CNN GIA interview said, people need to stop treating this JOB as a [paraphrase] "gee wheez, flying airplanezz is neeato, I'll do it for $7/hr and a free refill". The latter of course will ALWAYS be the case, which is why the industry is hosed. But the point remains, people can't hide under the "the future looks great so I can afford to starve while performing a technical and hazardous job" anymore, they just can't.
-- break break --
As to professionalism, I'm gonna have to revert to my Office Space quote. "You work hard enough not to get fired". This whole professionalism crap is unfunded altruism. Human beings work by incentives. Monetary compensation is a basic one, as it is one's means to attain your hierarchy of needs. The starving artist is an illusion. Nobody gives 100% for free. People do it for compensation, or in the case of pilots for the "promise of compensation". But nobody does it, when rationally and with lower tier needs not met yet, for free. Therefore the whole "do it for work ethic" is misguided. When there isn't adequate compensation for the valued effort nor does the promise of compensation exists anymore, it is irrational to provide the same amount of effort as one did when the former conditions were true.
I worked a retail catalog department while completing a graduate degree. I got paid crap. They needed somebody with a pulse and able to appease screaming customers. Criminal records were ok. I didn't have a criminal record so I was a god-send to these people. They knew I was overqualified, they didn't care, nor did I. Did I bust my hump? HEEEELLLL NO. I got paid crap. I was therefore 15 minutes late regularly and left the second my four hour shift was up. I was well liked by the customers and the job required one twentieth of my conscious attention span to accomplish. I did my job marginally which actually yielded above average results for their expectations, and was given the standard raise, which was still crap. I worked hard enough not to get fired. In the flying biz, that threshold is obviously considerably higher due to the technical nature of the work performed, but outside that higher datum plane, there is no rational reason these people should go above and beyond. If you think the extra effort gets you the cookie in a business whose goal is to have every employee be a carbon copy of each other (standarization, the achiles heel of pilot compensation), then you're a fool. When you get paid 21K with the explicit knowledge you are not going to break 100K in ten years and will probably be out of that employment within said 10 years, you have no rational need nor incentive to work harder than hard enough not to get fired. Some of you bellyache about that philosophy. You know what the rational thing to do is? It's to actually not take the 21K job in the first place! Irrational is to take the job and conduct yourself as if you were able to satisfy your needs with it, where you clearly cannot. But this is America, we can't accept we couldn't possibly make a living out of our affection for riding roller coasters (proverbially speaking). Life is soo unfair
