Pablo, I cannot comment on much of the intelligence you have as a pilot, after all I am just a passenger. I know relatively little about pilot/management/union interactions, even though my friend an neighbor is a 767/777 pilot for UAL.
My best argument is statistics. I came across this web site:
Accident statistics. As far as I can see the number of various types of accidents have held fairly constant decade by decade since the 50's, yet the amount of air traffic has increase many-fold.
A more personal, not so quantifiable, observation. When I started traveling heavily in the early 80's it seems that there were a little more than 2 crashes by major carriers per year in the US on average; now it is seems less than one per year.
I personally fly Delta Airlines on almost all domestic and Atlantic flights. Other than an MD-80 event (1996) where a failing engine killed 2 passengers before take-off, they have not had a fatality accident in 19 years.
While there are more and more stories about mishaps and near misses, I personally see air travel increasingly safer and safer. Maybe the pilots should take a lot of that credit, but statistics is statistics.