Thank you ampclamp. It confirms what I've heard.
However the last I heard, even returning LAMEs ad-hoc on a daily basis may be difficult, as the decision to release said LAMEs from SAM depends on the labour requirements in SAM. And as a certain acting ops manager told an SIT DMM in no uncertain terms, SAM will not be told by people at the terminals how to run its business, or who it cares to release to the terminals regardless of the license type and experience requested by the terminals.
Frankly, who could blame them?
sys 4 apparently. He and others see no problem with the company putting people through 5 months of turmoil in a faux consultation process, making it up as it goes along, disregarding some of the valid input of those it professed to be consulting, then disregarding its own selection criteria, cutting to the marrow, telling people they're "not good enough" for the terminals, changing peoples rosters, the impact that has on their family lives, forcing them to remake all their plans around childcare, spouses work arrangements, leave etc etc, giving them the time to settle in to the new roster, acknowledging that maybe some of that input they disregarded had merit, and then moving people back to their old sections with one week's notice, forcing them to unmake all the plans etc they have gone to great effort to remake over the last couple of months, force them to work 3 months straight without the opportunity to take leave in order to allow others to take their leave, and expecting them to
Suck it up and get on with the job.
If that happens I guarantee you there will be a few calls to HR and rightly so. Better a volunteer than a conscript. Frankly given all the above, I wouldn't blame them either if they came back to the terminals and required a cattle prod to motivate them.