I feel the company is going to ride out the current contract as far as they possibly can. They must know once negotiations start, the pilot group is going to be asking for major QoL and pay improvements and not getting them is going to be a non-starter.
I doubt that pay is the big stumbling block. While we're one of the lower paid companies, no one is at a regional for pay. It's the QoL that's the stumbling block, because it's going to prevent the company from hosing the pilots to staff the company every time there's an issue in EWR (which is every day). No more unlimited extensions, no more 90+ hr 'minimum credit' lines, no more pulling lines and throwing line holders on reserve to entice pilots to fly on their days off, and no more pulling line holders for training. The joke that we're all reservists with varying days off is very true at this company.
They've not been receptive to the unions offers to start negotiating early (and the MEC has been unwilling to agree to LOAs to patch the current contract since we're so close to our contract becoming negotiable). Tight now they can deflect any criticism by saying they're not negotiating right now. Once negotiations begin, the line pilots are going to start asking why the company isn't willing to give us a contract with the improvements that are fairly industry standard at this point. Aren't we a 'family' company?
They've done the 'we're over staffed on FOs before' and pulled back on recruiting and it's been disastrous. It's partially why we have no new CAs that are home grown, we didn't hire FOs in 2017 and now there's no one coming up on 1000 hours to upgrade. The company is extremely bad at figuring out long term staffing and instead survives on a model of what they need next month. That doesn't work in new hire (because it takes ~3 months to get a new hire through training) or figuring out CA staffing (because it takes ~2 years to make a home grown CA).