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Originally Posted by srleslie  As someone who used to be an over the road truck driver, I can personally attest to this. You always have the person willing to work for the bottom of the barrel company at low wages and poor working conditions. Many of those companies are just looking for a warm body to fill the seat, and couldn't care less about the driver. They just care about the bottom line. As long as someone is willing to settle for poor wages and poor working conditions, they will hold the rest of us down and keep the industry from improving. Truck driving has such a high turn over rate for those very reasons. Instead of banning together, drivers have stood by and let the trucking industry slowly deteriorate. Now with Congress opening the borders to the south, we will have Mexican truck drivers coming up in the US to deliver freight to and from Mexico at a fraction of the cost. Those companies have terrible safety recoreds too.
Now all of this may seem irrelevant to the world of aviation, but there are strong parallels. If pilots don't stand up and fight for higher wages and better working conditins, air lines may continue to lower the bar more and more. As long as airline executives can find warm bodies willing to work for less and continue to pad their pockets with more profit, nothing will change. |
Indeed, there are strong parallels here, after all, they are both transportation industries. On the one hand, its simple economics- if someone will do your job for cheaper (cheaper being both direct wage and also working conditions), they'll take your job unless you or the system prevents it. The catch comes with the quality of job done. Society is more willing to overlook dirty trucks leaking oil than it is poor maintenance causing planes to crash killing people. Also, to our benefit (at least for the airline and corporate guys) is that passengers want to see a trustworthy face in the cockpit when they board an aircraft- unlike the bulk of the trucking industry which operates behind the scenes.