vacation
Guys...
If you have a trip that is longer than your seven day block (in this instance) and it falls over your vacation, the entire trip is dropped. You can make up the difference (within 5 hrs) on your own or roll the dice and see if the company can backfill your available days when the trip doesn't touch your vacation. We don't have the ability to move our days (boy would I love that!) but the international guys have had fairly good success at gaming the system. Under the new contract, the company can dh or comml you back onto your trip on your available days. For the domestic guys, this really isn't a player (trips less than a week). So for the most part, one week of vacation can be turned into 3 and possible 4 weeks off in a row without too much problem (if you have the bidding seniority).
Ipaontop.org has some good information but was slanted towards showing why we should have voted no on the ta. It's really easy to cherry pick the good and bad and start thumping your chest about it. FF tends to cherry pick the bad things and highlights them. Your scheduling rules are overall better than ours (IMO) but we're getting closer. Our EDW (critical time for you?) gives us something close to your rules there. We were offered fedex scheduling if we took fedex scope. Not being a scope guru, I think we need scope more than you guys but only time will tell.
JMO
Pilot7576