Well apparently you never saw any episodes of their TV series - pretty drama packed ! Kinda like standing in line for a tractor pull or a County mobile home auction.
I've been in one of those lines. Nobody there was stupid enough to throw punches at a Sheriff's deputy if someone said the venue had to close because the workers didn't show up. For good or bad reasons of "not showing up".
Lots of noise here. Contract this, passenger that. Evil airline, dumb people. SJWs and PDVs.
What if the guy said something along the lines of 'it's time for change in the contract of carriage. I have a family plan for cellphone minutes. I want a family plan for airline tickets!' And thus he is starting the family first ticket movement. Maybe he'll start selling tshirts and bumper stickers...
Cell phone companies are NEVER stupid enough to charge less money than it takes to operate their business. They make money. Piles of money. Two of them make it on spectrum they got for free. Massive business plans are their budgetary backbone. Non-business consumers are their gravy. It keeps the employees paid to a fairly nice standard, really. Even the low level ones.
We compare more to a RN, about the same amount of education.
First year or two they don't make much, but after that the pay goes way up, also a seasoned nurse is a seasoned nurse, they can go to different jobs without taking a huge cut based on some "seniority number".
RNs have that arrangement because they don't take crap like pilots do.
We are the reason we have these troubles.
Nurses as a whole are underpaid for the stuff they put up with. It's a good salary, but it takes a special kind of person to do what they do for it. And a very weak or nonexistent gag reflex. LOL. There's also somewhat of a soft cap on nursing. You could be the best nurse on the planet, accolades and awards by heads of state... the company you work for still wouldn't let you get paid much more than a beginning Doc. If more at all. Nurse Practitioners are given the nod to make about 20% more, but they won't go much higher. The Docs get all grumpy.
Of course, the smart first year docs pay attention real close when a 20 year nurse tells them, "No, don't do that to this patient." The dumb ones, throw their weight around and holler that they want their orders followed. It usually works out bad for them, and often also the patient.
My girlfriend is almost done with her intern year as a surgical resident, and lemme tell you guys - I will *never* ***** about my job again. Well, at least not to her! Holy crap...talk about paying your dues...
Even residents are not as abused salary-wise as pro pilots. Yeah, they pay their dues, but they at least get paid for it. They get paid more later, but our psych resident friend is posting daily on FB about putting in offers for houses that cost more than double our house. She ain't hurtin'.
Boston's housing market sounds as bad as here though, with them having made three simultaneous offers at the same time and only getting "invited" to the post-offer bidding war for one of them.
Formal invitations to a bidding war for a house, in Boston. Amazing. And Art thinks the rednecks at the tractor auction are bad. LOL. The "city folk" look like they're having country problems, up there. Haha. I guess if they're wearing nice clothes and eating crackers and sipping on tea, while hoping to enslave themselves for another few years to a banker to get a wooden shoebox to live in, it's different. All civilized-like, up over yonder, there. Hahahahaha.
....
Sometimes I peek at the Commercial pilot boards and what not, with this dumb thought that I should at least look at doing some sort of commercial aviation.
Then I see what cities the newbies get stationed in, schedules are not good for commuters", initial pay lower than a schoolteacher salary with a bonus plan that looks like you'd need six hours in Excel to even figure out odds that you'd get any of it, stories of never ending labor disputes and whining about contracts.
Let's not even get into how senior Denver is, pretty much across the board. Haha. If I look at this stuff out of curiosity, I don't even entertain the idea of anything BUT commuting.
Denver based? ROFLMAO. If I started today, that'd happen at 65. Hahaha.
So there's that.
.....
But let's talk about this goofy-assed "dues paying" stuff...
I did "dues paying" in my biz and got paid lower pay than the senior guys for more work back in the day. A LOT lower.
But my biz never suggested putting me on a base salary below the national poverty line to make their ends meet. They charged enough to not have to ask employees to pretend that was reasonable.
All that were national companies also were REALLY careful to pay what people needed in their MOST EXPENSIVE cities in like jobs, and then adjust some cheaper cities downward a bit from there.
The airlines do that completely upside down and backward. They pay the least they can for the cheapest cost of living cities. And then employees literally claw their way out of the expensive hubs over time. Talk about "Hunger Games"...
In a nearly natural monopoly market like telecom, extremely commodity-like, we all just merge into three big companies and buy Congresscritters, and send out $150/month cell phone bills.
Telecom knows how to get everyone paid. We have starting call center workers paid better than your FOs, airlines. Seriously. Most telecom stocks pay dividends.
Clark's idea sounds crazy, but putting business fliers on monthly membership plans isn't the worst idea I've ever heard... if you want that business segment. Managers of short notice business travel groups would kill for a fixed travel budget number every year. Even if priced high enough their staff had to go on the road more than not. Our little fifteen engineer team would have definitely used something like that if it existed back in the day.
You think that smartphone in your pocket actually takes $150/mo in network resources?! Not a chance.
