It's the classic "rather set one guilty man free than send an innocent to jail" scenario. In my opinion you can teach/refresh the technical skills but the customer service stuff is innate: you either have that persona (it's not all about me) or not.

The analogy is the legacy carriers and furloughs. What about a guy that's been sitting idle for 5+ years as a plumber and is contractually obligated to be brought back? I'd be curious to see how many of those have failures and/or difficulty in training. I get it, it's a numbers game and when you're the house the odds are always in your favor. Statistics apply to generalizations not the individual. There's still a fairly large pool to select from and as long as that's the case, statistics that support generalizations will be applied.