roulis;
I wanted to say that, despite working together as you are doing, management and pilots are not in a common balance. The latter pay with their lifes the mistakes -as do the passengers-.
As I have just finished watching ITVs examination of British aviation and thence the story of Shipwrecks which I found fascinating in the quality and quantity of the parallels with the aviation industry (in terms of private power, invisible accountability and unbridled profit at the expense of thousands), I have to say that aviation has taken/learned a great deal from 19th Century shipping.
It has to be acknowledged that if aviation doesn't make money for it's owners/investors/employees then it will fail no matter how accountable, moral or socially-responsible it is. That's a principle of human endeavour - dreams, imagination and invention may be the seeds and even the energy for such enterprises but it has to survive on it's own. This realization changed the shipping industry, (just read the history of Plimsoll and recall how he was treated by the British Parliament), and I think for many obvious reasons, aviation learned faster.
Today, Safety is no longer a backwater appointment or even a career-ending management position as it was even two or three decades ago, within an airline's bureacracy, and programs that were seen as interfering with profitability and share price are today widely accepted as necessary partners in the enterprise.
Having been involved in management - pilot (union) work for many years, I have seen the positive changes at least in two companies, particularly where data analysis and the larger principles of SMS are "in play". While there is very much a need for the regulator's presence and oversight, SMS is now a far better way to do aviation's business.
One aspect of this question you might examine is the question of what changes a culture. In Canada we had a such a turning point with the takeoff accident at Dryden. The result was a public inquiry into aviation in Canada, led by Mr. Justice Virgil Moshansky called the
Commission of Inquiry into the Air Ontario Crash at Dryden, Ontario (Canada), popularly known as the Dryden Inquiry. It is well worth reading, particularly Vol's II & III. The Dryden Inquiry was a game-changer in Canada; the reverberations from Moshansky's work haven't stopped yet.
I'm not going to dwell on the details here, but the question of change itself is an important one for other country's regulators to examine, if only to reify their own approaches to this partnership of financial success and flight safety, in which pilots and their representatives are full partners and play an important role, even as some who would quietly seek otherwise dismiss pilots' views as "unionism" and "playing the safety card".