With safety the buck stops here. Every day at work, each flight I assume it is unsafe to go until via the evidence I have at the time(I.E. preflight, mx logs, rest, wx) I am conviced it is safe and legal to go. The question is how many hoops are you going to make me jump through to acheive that objective. The more hoops I have to jump through, the more errors I correct, the less likely on time will be. Further, if every thing is not right I'm not departing period.
That being said. I do think corporate CEO's do have a legal and moral imperative to make their corporate culture one that is safe and supports safety. Some CEO's live up to that moral imperative, others may not.
One example may be crew rest, a dual responsibility. The pilot is responsible to use the time alloted to rest, and if not rested then refuse to operate the flight. The company is responsible to schedule appropriately. Scheduleing reduced rest trips makes it difficult for a pilot to obtain the rest needed. Clearly a CEO can change a practice such as this. Reduce rest was intended to be a relief for unplanned circumstances not a cost saving measure to squeeze the last oz. of productivity out of crews (so that you do not have to hire any more). Thereby saving money and increaseing profit margin for the share holders.
By the way REZ, perhaps incidental to this discussion, I look at voteing to ratify the contract the same way. It's a no go until the evidence supports an affirmative ratification vote.
One of things Wilson polling told our MEC was that we wanted duty rigs, rumor is there are no duty rigs in this contract. If that is true, that alone is enough to send it back.