confusedalot wrote: ↑Tue Jan 01, 2019 9:23 pm
sounds like a true Canadian to me. keep people poor and stupid. instead of improving things.
That's quite the leap: you think that me explaining the current situation means I don't want to improve things? On the contrary, I strongly advocate for the imposition of a 1500-hour rule (or better yet, a 2000- or 3000-hour rule, but it would be much harder to justify an arbitrary hour requirement than the need for an ATPL) which would apply upward pressure on wages. That's exactly what happened in the US. What you don't seem to understand is that such action would require government intervention, and
that relying on free-market solutions is what has resulted in our current situation. In order to raise wages, we need to artificially reduce supply.
It's so easy for senior airline captains who are earning $250000/year to demand that every other pilot make sacrifices, so that their wages will increase to $400000/year; they don't bear any of the risk, but expect everyone else to put their careers on the line. When you're on the top of the pile and not planning to leave your job until you retire, or already retired, it's so simple to tell the 703 pilots not to work for Air Canada and double their incomes, but when you're one of those 703 pilots you're taking a huge gamble in turning down that job. You're banking on every single other pilot turning down the job until wages go up, but even if 99% of the offers are turned down, as long as AC can fill a ground school they won't have any reason to pay more. Now, those 703 pilots are in the same low-paying jobs they were in before, and there's no prospect to improve their situations. They're relying on complete and absolute solidarity among all pilots across the country to stand together when they turn down the job, and it only takes a few turds to ruin the punch. You can't expect someone who's making $30000 to stand on principle and turn down a job paying $55000 in the hopes that, at some indeterminate point in the future, it will result in higher wages until they know with complete certainty that not a single person will take that job at the offered wage.
You took a job at SkyRegional because it was the best-paying job you could get. Isn't it rather hypocritical of you to now insist that everyone else should hold out for higher-paying positions?
Edit: After thinking more about this, I realized that this proposal can be analyzed using Game Theory, and is similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma. "Regardless of what the other decides, each prisoner gets a higher reward by betraying the other ("defecting")...Because defection always results in a better payoff than cooperation regardless of the other player's choice, it is a dominant strategy." The outcome will be better for everyone if
everyone cooperates, but a single person acting in their own self-interest will result in everyone else losing, and the odds of someone else defecting are very very high; being the person who defects guarantees that you will be rewarded in some way, even if the reward is not the greatest potential reward available, until the number of defectors exceeds the number of rewards available. Furthermore, in the Prisoner's Dilemma there are only two participants, and only four possible outcomes, but for every additional person there is an additional outcome possible in which that person defects; if there are combinations allowed in which more than one person can defect, then the number of possibilities increases to the square of the number of participants, if I'm not mistaken. There will always be only one possible result where everyone cooperates and therefore everyone benefits, but every additional person exponentially increases the number of outcomes in which someone defects, so the larger the group the greater the number of negative outcomes. In a very large group, such as one with around 20000 commercial pilots, there is still only one outcome where everyone cooperates, but the number of combinations possible where one or more defect is 20000^2-1. Even if we assume that there are only, say, 500 qualified applicants to AC at any one time, that's still 500^2-1 possibilities in which one or more applicants defects, and only one in which everyone cooperates. Of course, at some point the number of defectors will become so large that there will not be enough positions available for all the defectors, and so some will gain nothing, but the important point is that
there is no punishment for defecting either, so there is no cost but potentially huge personal gain. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust 5 strangers to not betray me for their own benefit, let alone 500, so the rational choice is to defect.