Cirrus:
I think that Flying Lawyer or some such learned colleague might be your best bet for an informed answer to that one.
M.mouse.
I can't answer that question. The problem is, neither can management without some sort of consultation with the engineers themselves. The issue here is - and it's endemic - that a series of management decisions have been made by -nobody's sure who - about many things and no-one has bothered to think most of these things through; nobody has stopped to think about the Human Factors.
Don't get me wrong, I know it may seem debatable but I'm not a total halfwit: I know management have had some tough decisions to make and that consultation on every decision would be counterproductive and slow. It's not for frontline staff to make corporate decisions (I don't think it should even be the domain of the unions in most cases) I do, nonetheless feel that, once you've made a decision, it would go a lot smoother if you came to some sort of agreement with the affected parties on the best way to go about making changes.
You won't please all the people all of the time, granted, but you ain't gonna please anyone if you issue dictates; and any halfwit can see that when you are dealing with 20,000 or so frontline staff you have to keep them as sweet as you can.