Well I've been here ten years, and to the best of my knowledge, the EVP of flight operations (and engineering) sits around a table with a few VP's and SVP's of various departments who know nothing about our job, (and get bonus's of several times the magnitude of ours, based largely on how much money they can save from their respective budgets) and decide what is in our best interests.
The real positive out of this is that they have never failed to improve their own position by undermining ours.
As you can imagine, in the face of absolutely no repercussion for their actions/decisions, they feel little need to change the system. Seems to be working fine for them.