I think that there is a more simple motivation for all of this. Greed.!
This company is making Mega profits this year and as a result will have to distribute a good size chunk of change to their employees, in the form of profit share.
If however they can provoke one group to disrupt schedules, those costs can be greatly exaggerated and that means less to pay out to the staff. During the last sick out, all the experts put the costs at over a billion dollars. I've never seen Cathay admit to it having cost them very much. Why not engineer industrial action in reverse, it could save them millions.
I cannot comprehend that the company is almost asking us to go out, they are the one's who keep mentioning strikes not the AOA.
I have to ask myself why? when they are making such huge profits, it simply does not make any sense to conduct a business in this fashion. Especially in the service industry. But then nothing that this management has done since 1994 has made any sense