Glueball, my point is not that making the senior people redundant first is fairer, but that simply using LIFO is intrinsically unfair. Either is discrimination based on time served, and would be illegal in every UK employer. As stated elsewhere in the discussion about the FlyBE situation, the fairest way is to respect the law and limit redundancies to the fleet that is being withdrawn, be it a "senior" or "junior" fleet. It is, as was said then, the position not the worker that is made redundant, and playing musical chairs to keep those on higher salaries happy is as unreasonable as it is illegal. LIFO also means extra redundancies to cover the cost of the retraining and admin of the seniors being shuffled about - how is that fair to the extra few who lose their jobs to cover that cost? And if a company is on the ropes, wouldn't any costs imposed by LIFO be an unreasonable burden that could make the difference and push the company over the edge? How beneficial would that be to any employee, even the seniors?
There is no perfect system for any personnel management aspect, by seniority lists are absolutely evil and rotten to the core. The sooner that those airlines using them have to ditch them, which they will resist hard because of how much money it saves them by trapping their workforce, the better for all pilots. It's about time that aviation caught up with the employment practices of all the other professions in the civilised world.