FB,
"Furlough" is an American term, roughly the same as Leave of Absence. When there are surplus pilots, furloughs are first offered voluntarily, then compulsorily. It means you are out on the streets with no severance pay, technically still employed by the company. You have first refusal at any job that comes up for a certain period (I think about 5 years is the norm) and go back at your old seniority. Cheaper and easier than redundancies.
There have been periods when being a US pilot meant spending your first several years of employment being furloughed every winter. Reading Ganns "Fate is the Hunter", he also talks about being promoted to Captain every summer, only to be down-trained to FO every Winter for a number of years.
The thing that occurs to me about United and the other US carriers doing this large-scale furloughing is that the subsequent training costs must be enormous. Being strict seniority, it means Wide Body FOs being down-trained to Narrow bodies, Narrow Body Captains going back to Wide Body FOs, etc. etc. 1000 furloughs must mean around 3000 training movements, only to repeat the whole process in reverse when things pick up.
But, then, I'm sure the bean-counters know what they're doing....
