I have no title for this post

Okay, so maybe the airline pilots of PAL were subjected to "inhuman" conditions. I've been there, I know what it feels like to just want to not go to work anymore. Chances are, anybody who's worked in any field apart from the adult film industry would be able to relate. There's nothing wrong with hating your job, because it's a job. As I always say, if jobs are so awesome, we won't ask to get paid to do them.

But I have one request.

Can we please stop acting like the goddamn pilots who skipped the job are total victims?

First of all, I doubt that there's any condition hellish enough to say that being paid 100k a month is totally not worth it. People keep on reporting that their salaries are small. 100k a month is small RELATIVELY to say, 500k offered by Singapore Airlines monthly. I can imagine some people would suck cock at 30,000 feet everyday just to get the 100k kind of salary. Why? Because we live in a country where the average Metro salary is 15k, that's fucking why.

Next is the talk that the pilots were coerced to sign contracts into the sister company Air Philippines at a lower salary. Forced? I can't imagine a situation where a corporation can actually coerce you into joining another corporation without any option of bailing out. And if ever they were in fact coerced, how did they end up just saying yes? What methods were used? Am I supposed to believe that something like this happend?

Pilot: Listen, about the contract..
PAL: Have you signed it yet?
Pilot: It says here I'll be paid in airline peanut packets, is that a figure of speech for something?
PAL: There's no more room for interpretation tehre than there is room for sex in the airplane lavatory.
Pilot: Oh god. I don't want to...
PAL: Listen, I have 30 planes up there at any single time.
Pilot: So? I'm backing out.
PAL: Rumor has it a lot of our navigation equipment's been malfunctioning lately.
Pilot: ...
PAL: You don't want one of these airbuses to "accidentally" land on your 200-room house in Ayala Alabang do you?
Pilot: I... I...
PAL: I thought so. Peanuts it is.

Bottom line is the pilots signed up on a contract with a bond. Probably for reasons such as they had training. Training bonds are tricky, but they aren't very hard to understand. A company spends money on you to learn, and you gotta earn back - or pay back - the value there. It's a trade that may or may not be fair, but it's something you agreed to. You didn't accidentally walk into the office one day, slipped on a bananapeel and got your signature into the contract by sheer luck. You asked for it, you gotta pull through as law intends.

You can always resign. And then pay for the bond if you have to. That's just common sense. These pilots did neither. And they're supposed to be victims. I don't get it. Now everybody's whining and shit, acting like they didn't see it coming. I mean, come on. Didn't see it coming? Any guy who can read a newspaper would know that PAL's got a long dark history of screwing over so many of its employees. If its planes can be fueled with sheer hate, we'd have scheduled flights to the moon already.

If ever I should feel for anybody else, it's the smaller guys in PAL. Those guys whose jobs aren't about being inside the cockpit and travelling around the world. The guys who have to clean after them. Yeah, those guys. The guys who are still there, who have nothing to do with stranding passengers because they failed to live up to their end of their bargain.

And just because "There's better opportunity abroad."

Tell that to 90% of our countrymen who'd kill for their jobs.