Pardon me for being the dissenter, but this is rubbish. It sounds like an echo of A Knights Tale. You can change your stars if you want to. You just have to want to badly enough. It's like a melody that sounds nice, but just doesn't work in practice.
Years ago I was working air ambulance. I was doing it in remote locations in some tough conditions, lots of unimproved airfields, flarepots at night, and some hazards. I had been promised a probationary wage upon hiring, that would be brought up to a still less than livable wage after three months. At the three month mark, I was sent to a station where I worked for three days without food, in the rain, chaning engines on an airplane. Cold rain, too. On the third day, the owner of the company approached me to check on my work.
As he was there, I asked him when I could expect the promised wage. I told him I couldn't live on what he was paying.
"What are you saying?" he asked.
"I'm saying I want the money that was promised me. Clearly I have earned it, and we both know I do a good job."
"I see your lips moving, but I don't hear you saying anything. You wouldn't go to your college professor and ask him to lower your tuition because you can't afford it, would you?"
"I don't know," I replied. "I never went to school. I started flying when I was fifteen, and this is all I know."
"Well, you wouldn't. You should consider this your education, right here. By all rights, you should be paying me." He said it difinitively, and turned and walked away. I was increadulous. I couldn't decide weather to clock him in the back of the head with a wrench and then quit, or just walk away.
I had a pregnant wife, no money, no resources, and not enough money to last between paychecks. I couldn't afford to go anywhere else, and didn't have a stick of food in the cupboards. He had me over a barrel.
So we can change our stars? Perhaps I'm the ass responsible for low wages, because I took the job, when it was all I could find, and I was flat broke with no prospects and a pregnant wife in need? Perhaps. Perhaps because we had gone for two weeks without anything, and we were desperate. Perhaps if we all banded together and committed ourselves to better wages, fools like that man would change his tune?
Rubbish. Pure fallacy. It's never going to happen at small 135 operators, and there will always be the ignorant newcomers who are willing to pay for their jobs to cut in below us all and lower the bar. The employer mentioned above constantly reminded us of it. Then again, it's no different today.
I ended up quitting, and taking a job cutting logs and digging ditches in frozen ground on a mountain in the winter. We cooked on a wood burning stove, continued buying our clothes at the thrift shop, and made do in a small cottage on a mountainside where the cost of living was cheap.
Good idea, though. Use that leverage. Make the employers bend with the old standby, "Pay me more, or I'll show you! I'll starve to death, and it will be on your head!" And then the employer will double over with laughter as he rains down the resumes of ten thousand 300 hour wannabes who will pay twenty grand to take your job.
It's the nature of this industry. It's always been this way, and doesn't hold much promise of change.
