The holes in the cheese are becoming too large!
Our favourite metaphor for safety is speaking of how "the holes in the cheese lined up," to cause an accident. (Another, perhaps better, one is to speak of "the accident chain," a sequence of events that cause an accident.)
Well, you can buy cheese with little tiny holes or you can buy stuff with more holes than cheese, when both are still "cheese" but one will be much more prone to having its holes line up.
We already have regulations that mandate standards for this sort of thing; might it be worth raising those standards a bit? I know there were just some hearings re: Colgan (not that they are alone in this) but that doesn't seem to have brought any significant change to "business as usual." Somehow, just saying that burger-flipper wages are acceptable for aviation professionals... there has to be a flaw in that logic somewhere.