"Speaking of thread drift, does anyone have any insight as to what the Company thinks of this? Is Fred in favor of the age change? I envision an army of bean counters furiously crunching numbers to figure the cost of salaries, training, sick leave, vacation, expansion, hiring, retirements, medical, contract changes, etc etc and I'm sure they've got a plan to either mitigate or exploit the rule change. Any thoughts from the smarter guys on this board?"

While not claiming to be a "smarter guy" on the board, I will, as always, offer my opinion.

When you want to know what the company will do the old rule of "follow the money" almost always works. I am sure they will both mitigate and exploit this issue for their profit. As training is a pretty big expense, it is unlikely they will want to train anyone who can not give them at least 5 years or more of productivity. Considering those older among us have the most vacation and highest usage of sick time I am sure they will not want to retrain anyone over 60. Having said that, if they can find a way to get something else that is of more value to them to facilitate the MEC policy of retroactivity (say PBS as an example) they may agree to an LOA regarding displacements to allow just that. Unlikely, but after what we have witnessed with the MEC ignoring the membership wishes to help out a small minority, not as unlikely as I once believed. As usual, the company has taken the wiser road here of remaining quiet until they see how everything turns out. When it comes to retroactivity I think the MEC should have done the same instead of causing such needless discord amongst their membership, especially since they now say it probably won't happen anyway.