You take a successful airline and dwindle the staff numbers to the point where there is no stby cover and cancell flights on a daily basis due to this issue while continuing in your role?
Yes you do, and to be fair I think I can understand why they do it. There's a couple of reasons.
If you keep it at a certain low-ish level you'll inconvenience a few hundred or thousand people. They may chunter about how they'll "never fly with [airline, usually BA] again", but the majority do. Remember the news footage of any past BA strike or summer of chaos and you'll know what I mean. As long as it's not at an outrageous level - ie, like hospital patients on trolleys in corridors - you won't get any real widespread public perception of a problem. Do it on routes where you've got a monopoly and you've nailed them.
So why do it? It's an accounting trick, although not necessarily good business sense.
A key business metric is revenue, and in airlines forward booking percentages. To get your reward you need to keep this growing compared to the same period on the previous year.
Likewise, costs. You want to keep these low. And you don't want this to grow every year.
So what do you do? Pitch it at the right level, and undercrew but not enough to piss enough passengers off. You book their revenue and forward booking numbers, you keep your costs low - and the money you have to splash out cleaning up after your cancellations? Ah, that goes in the "extraordinary non-recurring" section. Doesn't matter that they are daily costs at an undercrewed airline, the trends on revenue and cost are the ones that are paid attention.
Mean while Stelios behaves like a spoilt brat throwing his props out of the pram at every available opportunity. Such a shame for an airline that should be expanding and taking advantage of these difficult times.
FWIW, Stelios is behaving entirely reasonably. Easyjet are allegedly exceeding the limits of what they've paid for - the lease of the Easy brand with 75% of activity to be derived from flying. Stelios has many of his own interests under the easy brand, and doesn't want the Easyjet airline company overstepping into his patch. Very simple. And when you consider he owns what, 40-odd percent of a company capitalised at a few hundred million pounds, he can probably be forgiven for wanting to see some income from it - like a dividend, or at worst some serious capital growth, neither of which have been forthcoming. What a crybaby eh?