kronan

Focusing solely on the 1000 hours here, your points about work hours qualifying for a Pension in general and quoted are completely accurate.
But, IMO, you are mistaken as to why our Union and Cheiron used 1,000 hours as the basis for the modeler.

1,000 CH's is a standard bench model used for Contract comparisons. If you go back to 2016 and search out Delta's comparison with UPS, you'll find 1,000 hours was used as the work times hourly rate to generate a comparison.
If you look at TA Value comparisons, across the industry, you'll see the estimated value of a TA based on 1,000 credit hours.

IMO-that 1,000 hours likely has it's origin in the FARs. The vast majority of FedEx trips are soft time trips. FedEx pilots accumulate a fraction of the block hours our Pax airline brethren do,