LRRP
Apologies that no one has answered your excellent post. Also apologies to engineers and cabin crew - you are every bit as important as us but this being the PPRUNE I will talk about pilots!
I am a pilot which is a job I love doing. I am not a 'manager', and have no desire to be one, but have considerable sympathies with management. The bottom line is that money-in must exceed money-out. Without that there is no viable business. Pilots are sometimes guilty of not recognising that. The answer to your question is that if the money is not there to support the business, then managers must act quickly to reduce numbers or there will be no future for anyone. I do not know the specifics of VS's management failures, but I cannot think what else they could have done given the financial disaster that was looming. There has been much criticism of companies using Sep 11 as an opportunity to 'weed the garden', but my own view is that it just caused companies to wake up and get real over the state of their finances. VS were about to make cuts before Sep 11, as were bmi, Gill, British Airways, Maersk, British European, ScotAirways, British World etc etc. Sep 11 may have forced their hand but all was not well before then. This has lead to massive cuts in the pilot workforce in the UK as we all know (and loads of others as well- but this is about pilots please remember). Any manager worth his salt had to make hard decisions and many have done.
I do not know how many pilots have lost their jobs in the UK (hundreds) in the last few months, but maybe pilots should be considering how many foreign pilots are working here under 'flag of convenience' passports. At a time when no British Frozen ATPL can get a job, our UK-based airlines continue to recruit experienced pilots from overseas because it is more 'cost-effective'. That is the 'management issue' that I would deal with.