Management has been the undoing of Express much more than "market forces" or a flat overnight segment. Ground is Fred's Golden Goose right now, but what makes you think they can't mismanage Ground too? Express used to be a major profit generator, long before they started to micromanage it into the absolute mess it is today.
There is exactly one reason Ground is successful, and that is ultra-low labor costs. That's it. Take away your underpaid box monkeys and what do you have...nothing. Let's see how successful Ground is if and when labor costs rise.
Has Express ever had a 20% operating margin? It's really impossible for us to do what Ground does given the low pay, no benefits, trucked instead of flown environment. That they are doing this is their business, not my place to tell them how they should choose to run a business. That they used us, lied to us, screwed us over when we were doing the work that made them successful and made Fred über rich is our business. I'm sure that they feel differently, but they owe it to us to do better by us. I think, seriously, the reason they're taking their time with the transition is they know too much too fast will probably cause some violence. I can say that I'm 51, will retire soon, yada, yada, will deal with it. But tell a 38 year old divorced father of three paying child support that he'll have to work another job along with FedEx just to get by after 15 years of hard work and you may have a guy snapping. And there are probably a few thousand in the ranks that have the potential to snap. This is a B.S. environment to put us all in while they pursue more profit, and if someone ends up doing something terrible the word will get out about what they're doing to the future of their employees.