I've never understood why FAs get paid more as their seniority increases. This policy only makes sense in jobs where the more experience you have, the more profit per hour you can produce for your employer. But if we are to take the "FAs are here primarily for your safety" claim at face value, FAs' value actually decreases as they get older, as their physicial agility declines. And it's not at all clear to me how the non-safety FA job functions can be performed substantially better (in the sense of producing more profit per hour for the employer) after 10 years of experience than after 1--seems to me that those skills are picked up within the first year on the job, and then plateau.

Maybe I am missing some justification for the scaling-pay-with-seniority policy?