Trueline,
There is a lot more to it than just 'supervisors' being put on AWAs.
TFN and co. offered the supervisory(ALM) roles ONLY on AWAs (politically driven) these positions replaced the team leader role.
Team leaders, on the whole , had extensive operational experience and time in the job. The ATS Line Manager (ALM) job would NOT be a position that involved actual controlling of aircraft but would involve a large increase in pay.
Quite a few of the team leaders had reservations about the positions and chose not to take them up. At the stroke of a pen in September 2007 we lost @100 controllers who were now 'managers'.
Some of these 'managers' had less than 2 years experience, some have had 'show cause' notices due to 'chequered' controlling careers, the experienced one are shaking their collective heads wondering why they ever took up the position in such a dysfunctional organisation.
And this is why passengers are sitting on tarmacs getting frustrated, because we never had the staff to go down the ALM path and TFN and his cronies are loath to admit that they forgot to do any staff planning and then exacerbated the problem with their SDE (Service Delivery Environment) project that spawned ALMs.
SDE, makes you laugh, doesn't it?