Professor,
You say "business is not about being nice to employees", yet you berate the staff at QF for not being nice to you.
I cannot understand why Dixon and supporters of his, like you, believe the best way to run a service based business is to create an entirely adversarial environment with the staff.
Whether you like it or not human nature is what it is, and if you provide no positive feedback, an atmosphere of intimidation and bullying, and constant negativity about your worth, then you are going to get the bare minimum in return. This is what is now becoming more prevelant at QF.
Personally, I'm amazed it took this long to gather some momentum. I think it's great that the engineers have finally taken Dixon's bullying ways on, and wish them all the best.
Prof, you would be wise to have a look at the Reason model of accident causation and apply it to QF. There are always latent reasons lying behind an outcome you can see. In this case bad attitude from the staff has been created by years of abuse from management, and simply blaming the staff is a shallow and simple outlook.
As far as being CEO of "the most profitable" airline. Have a look at another thread on here listing the waste of QF management. Don't forget that alot of their profitability after 2001 was just plain luck. The collapse of AN 3 days after sept 11 was a massive stroke of good fortune for Dixon. As a matter of fact, the only measure I can see that they deserve any credit for is a very good fuel hedging policy. But praising them for that is like praising me for putting the gear down before landing- that's what they're suppose to do!