It seems the common advise for a new pilot is to compare employment opportunities (whether 135, 91 or 121) by looking over the contracts of the various employers for both serving pilots and commitments for new hires. Salary, bonus payments and other compensation obviously vary widely as would time commitments. The question is, can that information be gathered other than by querying each individual company? Even cadet programs seem, at first blush, to be pretty consistent but the devil is in the details. Where does a new guy look?

Really you need to talk to people.

Like the law, the actual implementation of a contract depends on the company, union, and precedent. Often they are intentionally written to be extremely hard to understand and ambiguous to interpretation.

There are some contract comparison docs floating around for the majors right now (many are in negotiations). These docs provide a side-by-side apples-to-apples comparison of key contract provisions. I suspect there's something like that at one or more regionals too.