Sunfish,
I agree with you totally regarding your last post.
Unfortunately you are wrong! : there are more "paper shufflers" there than workers and two or three levels of management that just don't need to be there.
The ONLY slightly good (relative term) thing I can say about our senior management is that they probably don't even know what is going on because of all the filtering these layers do.
When they do make someone redundant it is invariably the wrong people.
Qantas is stuffed, and it is senior management and the board over the last ten to fifteen years that have done it.
That said, the right management there for a while and it could be fixed.