Who do you fly for?

HAHA, thats exactly what I was thinking, definitely ironic!

but James, glad you're happy, but really how many did you have tonight?!

All good points, but I believe that battle will be far longer than anyone presently can imagine. With barriers to entry reduced to "sign here," the stampede of 20-year-old kids who would fly for free just to impress their buddies, and proletariat laborers who would naturally rather fly a jet for minimum wage than dig a ditch for minimum wage, has shallowed and widened the talent pool, resulting in such a glut of low-quality (comparitive to those of yesteryear) applicants that any attempt to rectify the payscales in today's environment would be futile.

Your over-simplified attitude of the 'proletariat laborer' is quite naive. We can't all come from your opulent 'bourgeoisie' status ...some of us had to work for a living at some point. I didn't realize that if you dug ditches before landing your airline job you were 'shallowing the talent pool'.....bad form

I actully think IROC made a great point with the ditch digger.

If i said I was gonna pay you the same amount of money to either dig a ditch or fly a plane what would you rather do?

Unfortunately i am seeing this field attract more and more people who come from less fortunate backgrounds and therefore are willing to accept that same lifestyle because they get to fly a plane. Like that thread SAAB started a couple weeks ago about the appearance of pilots. I remember flying back in the day and never once (that i remember) did I see a pilot in the airport who looked anything less than first class. Now i see porky rollin around with the back of their shirt untucked looking like they just rolled out of bed, its sad to see!

thanks man, i did have Quite a few...

That may be true if the profession had no barrier to entry, but I think the (relative) difficulty and price of flight training in addition to paying for college would deter the vast majority of those doing it to brag to friends.

As for the second part... there will always be incompetent pilots, and while there are probably more now compared to "yesteryear", hopefully the system will weed them out the way it is designed to (i.e. through checkrides, hiring tests and interviews, proficiency checks, etc.).

Please no one get me wrong. i too have been interested in aviation my entire life. i'm not some ditch digger who throws down the shovel for an easier job such as "reginal airline piloting" sorry my humble middle class background doesn't fit in. but when the time comes in my career, i'll be right along side all my peers in the fight for better everything in this industry

You misunderstand me, sir! I only mean "quality" from the standpoint of economic bargaining power and opportunity cost. Today's reduced barriers to entry have allowed much greater numbers of those with little, if any, of either, to enter the talent pool. With any drastic increase of availability of applicants (barring anomalous events such as the end of a war) comes an inevitable decrease in overall quality, resulting in incentive to lower compensation.
I believe this to be the core labor philosophy of Jonathan Ornstein and his ilk. I disagree with such exploitive tactics, but the market allows them for the very reasons I've described.

I believe that the people who would fight hardest, and be better "quality" in the realm of economic bargaining for higher wages, are the ones who are hurting the most financially; not these rich kids who don't even know how their student loans are being paid for and will never see a loan bill or fight off creditors. Those are the types of kids who end up going right to Mesa and to a poor labor contract (because they can afford to do it).

The "ditch-diggers" and the "20 year old kids" should be classified into two different groups.

I believe the "low quality" applicants you speak of are not the ditch diggers, but the kids who have never dug a ditch in their life, and will take any job as long as the jets are shiny and they can impress their friends (not to say that all Mesa pilots never worked other jobs before, but they can somhow afford the low QOL aparently). The people who earned their keep by working menial jobs and hard labor to work their way through college, however, will want what’s coming to them, and not settle for a crappy QOL. Sorry though, if I misunderstood your original point.