If the "violet letter" just put out by management comes to fruition in the form of BLG/RLG rollbacks, potential furloughs, and most certainly severely stagnated growth, has the company considered the financial hit from destroyed morale?

Don't think it won't happen, it's just that they are not accounting for it.

Anybody care to list the ways that this could end up costing far more than is expected? There are myriad ways that this could rear it's ugly head.

If you can't show it on a ledger, they haven't planned on it

I doubt that "pilot morale" is included in any calculations of the bottom line.

One would have thought they'd have a line item labelled "Tuna Fuel" by now. Either too dumb to know, or too arrogant to care.

Or a line titled "Fly around with the speed-brakes up"

At my last airline low morale meant 15-20 minutes onto each hard time leg. Sense of urgency goes way down.

Exactly, one of the big drawbacks to the metrics craze in business (and military). Introduce what everyone knows is a negative morale procedure and depending on the metric you will see same results. (Packages moved- yes). What is easly explained away is the hit in performance in other metrics, but easily rationaled away.
Smarter companies do measure employee satisfaction and morale correctly. Airlines and logistics companies don't. They just have their own method to justify that employees are happy..Afterall, most of us stay regardless....

No offense, boss, but you don't have a lot of experience with the airline biz, do ya? That's no slight towards you personally, just an observation; I wish I had a whole lot less (bad) experience in this industry than I do.

How do you think I feel after finishing my third year of probation in my life to see an FCIF from PC with the words "FedEx" and "furlough" in it?

As far as a metric used for measuring morale, this ain't the military. The colonel isn't going to visit you and ask if your morale is high or low. The colonel is this case doesn't give a damn. It's all about the bottom line and mgt doen't care if you're happy. It's a job, man: just fly, pick up your check, and go home.

Ask your bros at AA, UAL, DAL, US, and NWA if low morale has cost their company money. Then ask them if their mgt cares.

Perhaps the rose colored glasses at FDX are disappearing. At least this time around, bankruptcy is not mentioned in the same message as furlough.