You may recall the Thanksgiving episode from 1990 in which Jack had a promotion at Norcom and got to travel a great deal. Remember him saying he had to fly to places like Pittsburgh and Denver? Since Jack was back at home in the episodes that followed (save for a trip to Cincinnati in the "Road Trip" suit buying episode), I thought that Jack lost the promotion since he did not travel so much.

Was this an attempt by writers to write Dan Lauria out of the script?

I seen it lots of times since 2005