Well, I suppose that article will be true in a few months, since there will be no REAS and thus no REAS employees in GA.
At MSP we start at 8.50/hr and top out at 10/hr after a few years. There are some employees from the old XJ days, but the most senior guy at MSP has 25 years under his belt and makes 14/hr, IIRC. Even those guys aren't getting rich. Maybe some of the problem is that we are always understaffed, so there is always a bit of overtime available and if those guys get it, REAS is paying out a bit more than what a normal employee would be getting to fill it.
I had lunch with the SVP once, he said that the main overhead for REAS was HR related: wages & benefits. REAS had one amazing thing going for them that I don't see other suppliers have: part-time flex scheduling + good flight benefits (depending how you look at it). Part time flex employees worked at most 36 hours per pay period and retained full flight benefits, but with none of the other benefits (health, retirement, pension, etc). Some schedules were 4 hour shifts, 4 days per week, maybe a 12 hour day and a 4 hour shift and other schedules were every other weekend.
Most of these people have day jobs else where and are just there to fly. Some of my coworkers were originally from overseas, made well over 100k annually and would use the benefits so they could take their family back home several times per year.
I believe that they should have axed full time employees all together and gone solely with the part time flex model. Corporate had 3 years to get their house in order, so I squarely place the blame on them.