Originally Posted by
acl65pilot
Lets start the answer to this question with another question. How do Doctors and Lawyers limit their numbers? Go find out the answer to that question and you have important piece of the puzzle.
No matter what pilots or management says, supply and demand effect everything from pilot salaries, hiring minimums, air fares etc. So restrict the supply to match the demand.
Lawyers and doctors, work independently amongst themselves.
Amongst those professional fields, there is a mutual understanding of what compensation should be for services rendered.
Once an attorney or a doctor becomes more experienced, he or she will gain a reputation that will allow them to charge customers for that particular expertise.
Unfortunately, we as pilots, operate under a mask of ongoing ignorance. What I mean by that is, your average passenger is completely oblivious to the experience level of the flight crew. Dire emergency situations don't occur everyday, but we are trained to deal with them accordingly.
Essentially , we are all trained to one particular standard, without exception. By using the doctor and lawyer analogy, we should get our raises and bonuses based on how well we perform on our line checks and sim rides.
Of course that scenario is implausible, but it brings about one specific point. We as a pilot group must collectively decide as a whole what our self worth is. I think the entire arguing point of trying to raise the standards for new pilots trying to break into the industry is comical at best. It is the equivalent of assigning the responsibility of raising compensation and labor contract standards to pilots who don't even work at an airline yet.
Things have gotten as bad as they have because ALPA will essentially ***** themselves out to ANY pilot group willing to divest 2% of a pilot's pay while increasing the member population. Scope was allowed to be given away by those who have passed before me, and ALPA did absolutely nothing to discourage this. As of result of these haphazard decisions, the traditionally, less-experienced regional companies were allowed to grow exponentially at the expense of mainline cutbacks.
Now mainline pilots want to raise the standards, seems backwards to me.
Man up and demand the contract you think you deserve, and if you want a pilot with a Master's Degree in the left seat then you better add another $100K to the captain's salary, at least.