In other words, don't fixate on the hourly rate. It isn't the whole picture.
Truer words were never spoken!
Pay rate is one part of the picture, but it isn't the whole thing, not by a long shot. Pay RATE doesn't feed the family, doesn't help you qualify for a home loan, doesn't pay for kids' college, etc etc. Along with hourly rate, a more complete picture would look something like this:
For each airline, if you were hired in ___, the 25th% got paid $XXXk and worked yyy days last year, and the 75th percentile got $ZZZk and qqq days:
1975 $xxx for yyy days, $zzz for qqq days
1976 etc
...
2004 etc
2005 etc
W-2 wages are what feed Mom and the kids, get you qualified for the home loan to buy your (next) house, pay for college, and do all the nice things that money does buy. Some 3rd year 737 FO at ABC looking at XYZ's rates for a 3rd year 737 FO and thinking he's underpaid is only a valid comparison if XYZ actually HAS 3-year 737 FO's! If everybody at XYZ in their 3rd year is still on the panel (or the E-190, or the F-100, or whatever), that isn't a valid number!
True story: UAL once (once!!! and utterly unique and never-gonna-see-it-again circumstances) had a 4th year pilot as a 737 captain... and their 4-year captain rate at the time was better than SWA's 4-year captain rate. Some guys looked no further than those two numbers, and the fact that SWA was running about a 5 year time to upgrade, and jumped ship to UAL... only then to find out that they'd be on the panel for a while and an FO for a long, long time... the only guy who made captain in 4 years were the VERY BOTTOM of the VERY FIRST bid to United Shuttle (which had some serious stigma attached to it among United pilots). Normal upgrade times (i.e. by the time these guys from SWA arrived at United) were running much, much longer -- 10-12 years plus, I think. Bottom line, on a year-by-year basis, the guys at SWA had W-2's that met or exceeded their year-group contemporaries at UAL, even though the hourly wage charts looked like SWA was left behind in the dust.
(Then you get into how many credit hours you can actually get paid for each month at each place -- not entirely related to block hours actually flown, and that before considering sitting reserve vs not sitting reserve... then talk about retirement, A-plans, B-fund, 401(k), profit sharing, etc... and you see how the picture gets a lot bigger than hourly pay rates pretty quickly.)
Don't get fooled into focusing on the bit of the iceberg that's visible and ignoring the larger part of it that isn't so easily seen below the water! There's a
lot more to annual pay and career earnings than just hourly rates!
)
