Trust Mr O’Leary to add fuel to that inferno with his accusation that some pilots were being “precious about themselves” and “full of their own self-importance”. Not to mention jabs at the amount of hours they have to work.
Most airline management uses the same economic textbook; lower unit cost for labour. (at any cost)
Such thinking has preoccupied business school MBA's for decades.
It is not only airlines where teams of expensive accountants pour through accounts looking for ways to lower unit cost.
O'Leary's secret recipe isn't secret, it is replicated all throughout the airline industry. The same cocktail parties see these modern day romeo's swapping notes on the practices that made O'Leary a poster boy for ADVERSARIAL INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS.
Qantas (in Australia) even went as far as replicating an entire airline to isolate and control the mainline terms and conditions: It is called Jetstar.
They never imagined that their model had one fatal flaw; declining supply.
It is a structural shortage beginning with demographics and ending with an IR structure that at its genesis is a destructive, adversarial and divisive model. Where people are simply units of labour to be derided, outsourced and minimised endlessly.
Time for the mutinous pilots to book the gains they’ve made and pipe down?
If I were in their shoes I would at this point ask myself whether leopards ever really change their spots.
O'Leary has a huge infrastructure of workplace relations, human refuse practitioners who will not willingly go into the night. To them and O'Leary as hammers every problem is a nail and as such they will not fully appreciate that this is not cyclical, it is structural