I'm not sure of the actual percentages, but I'd say a solid majority of the guys I know here HAVE worked at other airlines prior to coming here, or possibly while on furlough. As many here seem to do, I also bid Short Call Reserve rather than a Hard line because I realized Short Call Reserve gave me a lot more time at home for an easy 76 hours of pay. Factor in one, maybe two Premium trips, and all of a sudden I'm not only flying less and home more, but I'm bringing home more money too. A lot more. Win, win, and win! Granted, I've been based where I live for the past two out of three years, so I'm not commuting to Reserve.
As a hard line holder, at least on the Airbus, I've almost always had two and three day trips, which are so much easier on the psyche for me in terms of feeling like I'm gone for a long period of time when compared to a long four day trip (Four day trips were the norm at my former Regional). The problem I see, at least at my base, is so many of the trips are 11.5 hour trips that touch three Calendar days, so they're inefficient, and the resultant lines end up being low time with a lot of days away from home. In order to try to make a bit more money, I'd slip another trip or two in there, and next thing I knew, I had only ten days off for a measly 85 hours or so. This is where the minimum value of a day would make a huge difference, and I believe we'll get that at some point whwn the company needs something from us one of these days - just as Delta pilots got their minimum day as a result of the company needing something (as told to me by two Delta pilots in our two jumpseats from ATL to DFW some time back).
I and almost all of my friends here and at other Majors spent years at the Regional level, so we can say with some authority that Regional contracts, when taken as a whole, were not and are not superior in almost any way to our contract. Yes, there were and are certain cherry picked provisos that are certainly better, but taken as a whole, all of my friends and I agree that the contracts we worked under at the Regional level were significantly inferior to what we have here. The Regional contracts are full of caveats written in the company's favor - words and phrases like "may" and "at the company's discretion" come to mind. Those words are littered all over thin, the poorly written contracts at that level.
Yes, we certainly have a long way to go to improve our contract, when compared to our peers at the mainline level, but to say that our contract is inferior as a whole to any Regional airline's contract is a pretty big stretch.