MM,
perhaps it's just the culture shock from being indoctrinated for years about the fact that safety is paramount, only to find that when push comes to shove, safety is not allowed to cost any money and just get the job done, stop bitching. And the guys who got mortgages based on the pay rise are in more trouble nowadays if they are made redundant than before.
Job satisfaction is going down the drains as they take away the tools with which we can do a professional job, so is loyalty when people are being made redundant in illogical ways and it will only be a matter of time before what's left of the professionalism goes that same way. Humans are simply like that.
And as there are numerous ways in which I can get killed by somebody else's mistake (let alone mine) and the working environment is being set up to become more incident-prone, I start worrying about these things when really I should be concentrating on other stuff like flying the damn thing safely.
I fear that it will take another accident to prove that there are limits to how far you can cut a budget and still maintain a safety margin. As usual, the important lessons will be written in blood, but it's never the blood of those faceless grey suits (just review the Aussie HEMs crash thread, looks very similar to this one, the difference being they HAD their fatalities).
It's all good and well, market economy etc. but I don't want to suffer the GoM safety record in my working area just so somone can make more profit.