Brace yourself for incoming "STHU new guy pay your dues!!"
I'm 100% in favor of what you suggest and IMO we could have got that without spending one penny of negotiating capital, because the company desperately needed the freeze relief. We missed the opportunity because we just didn't care. Oh well. At this point its up to market forces to make the company provide industry standard in this area.
FWIW we "traded" the additional year's freeze for not only the short course reduction, but also got the one year mark "escape valve" to slightly mitigate the negative effects of a freeze. So you can still bail after a year if you need to in order to change bases.
In the cases where you just want off the plane, but to remain in your current base, you can still bail to another base, assuming you can hold what is required there etc, and then bounce back in the following bid, again assuming you can hold that as well.
Its a concession, albeit a minor one. IMO hotels for all training should be standard here as it is most other places. I'd also like to see the asinine "training pay" go away and be replaced with a system like UAL has.
Maybe we'll get em next time.
