I feel like I responded to a lot of this earlier, but apparently it's been missed.

BE customers already are already cleared into E- seats only unless none are available. Assignment of E- seats to BE passengers is processed by automation. If automation can't put a BE passenger into an E- seat since none are available, then the seat assignment goes to the gate where the gate agent assigns E+ if no E- seats are available. For operational reasons, it is not feasible to wait until D-10 to assign BE seats. So inevitably some BE passengers will get E+ when the plane later goes out with empty E- seats once no shows are offloaded at D-10. If you don't want this to occur, you are asking for flights to be delayed in order to make BE seat assignments at the last second.

In IRROPs, especially controllable IRROPs, one of the best service recovery gestures is to give those customers E+ seats complimentary on the rebooked flights. A small gesture like this has minimal cost to the airline, fosters goodwill after the customer's trip was disrupted, and inevitably is cheaper then later issuing a voucher or some other form of compensation as the customer already feels they have been taken care of.

Non revs from other airlines are treated the same as any other non rev (albeit lower in boarding priority), it is this way at all of the US based airlines that have agreements to allow their employees to nonrev with another carrier.

Previously addressed this in one of my earlier posts. This is not a feasible policy in the modern airline industry where incremental revenue from seat assignment purchases represents a sizeable chunk of revenue. Unless the seat next to you doesn't have any incremental value associated with it (which unless you are in the back of the plane, it does), the airline is risking giving away incremental revenue by blocking that seat. United brings in more incremental revenue from people paying for these seats you want blocked in a single day, then any individual GS is going to spend with them in a year.

That starting amount is a full $7 more per hour then the contract for ramp workers dictates they should be starting at. So it's not so much a cost of living area issue (as they were able to get people before at the contract rates) as it is the labor market has substantially changed over the past 2 years and they, like many other employers are still trying to figure out what a fair wage is for hundreds of markets they operate in while still keeping costs controlled. They could easily offer $50/hr and their staffing shortage resolved, but I suspect we wouldn't like what they would mean to ticket costs or the long term viability of the airline with that much of a change to their costs. But this is drifting from the original topic although would be a great discussion for another thread