Originally Posted by
gloopy
What if your airline didn't go TU, or you are just simply happy with your airline. wouldn't you want the opportunity to enjoy the career progression that you signed up for, rather than having super senior pilots bidding on top of you for 20-30 years? Yeah out of seniority upgrades are great for the ones that get them, but for everyoe else they kind of suck a little bit. And its as much arbitrary cronyism as it is merit based quite a bit of the time. How about your airline gets a new fleet type, and guys start pouring in from off the street to fill positions. Leverage for them, stagnation for you, and as an added bonus the company can save a few bucks by slacking off on a real training program.
So what? You have a number of companies that promote from within, and you have companies that don't. The companies that don't, they tend to have a revolving door. There would be nothing stopping you from going somewhere else and selling your services to the highest bidder. Others might come ahead of you, but you can also choose to go elsewhere too. It all boils down to company culture.
This can be addressed down the road... but more importantly... we're talking about the justification of the seniority-based pay structure.
I mentioned in another post when I was a 4th year 737 FO, and there was a newhire pilot who spent at least a decade longer in the industry than me, had thousands of hours in a 737 more than me, had twice my total time, yet I was making 3 times his wage STRICTLY because of date of hire. I thought that was insanely wrong. That was my second big eye opener about the wrongness of the current system. The first was when we were told during our concession talks - we should take this pay cut because it's better than having to start over making 1st year wage again somewhere else.
Horrible idea, will never happen, should never happen and there are far better ways to address the lack of career portability here in the US than emulating the third world or the uber low time ab-initio Euro-elitist hiring situations.
What's sad is that that "uber low time ab-initio Euro-elitist" makes at least twice the wage right out of school with 200 hours total time than you do after years and years of "paying your dues." Again, who's the chump?