Clipped;
If any of this opens just one manager's eyes who lurks here, it will have done some good so hopefully it's not spleen venting. It's not intended as such anyway.
When? Management will discover this only when the costs are too high.
That statement means airline managements have consciously made the decision to be "safe enough but not as safe as before", just so that costs go down. That means starving safety programs or providing them with absolutely minimal (meaningless box-tick) resources just so they can pass an IOSA audit.
Anyone who wishes to examine the dynamics of this kind of organizational behaviour for themselves can read "The Challenger Launch Decision" by Diane Vaughan, or "Organization at the Limit", edited by Farjoun and Starbuck and Starbuck's article, "Fine-tuning the Odds Until Something Breaks". The term, "normalization of deviance" which is the process of lowering standards until they are "normal" and deviance from previous standards is no longer visible but the standard is lower, was coined by Vaughan in her book.
Nobody wants an accident. Although completely true, that is the illusion such normalization is accepted under. But both statistically and historically, with such an approach the risk goes up. Because very few organizations are actually, really, looking at their flight data, (because either the experts have left out of frustration or, under SMS, operations people have no time and don't understand the information anyway), they do not have any idea of where they stand in terms of risks and trends. So standards are being lowered but in actuality little monitoring of the effects of such changes is going on. That is what is meant by being able to do cost-control safely - if one monitors carefully, one can cut safely. But cost-control mantras cut a wide swath and the first to go or at least lose support are the safety people and programs.