ATLANTA — Hostile takeovers make strange bedfellows. Case in point: Delta management and its pilots union.
The two sides were at each other's throats earlier this year over Delta's ultimately successful effort to wring a second round of hefty pay cuts from pilots and win approval to terminate their pension.
But Tempe-based US Airways' $8.9 billion bid to buy Delta has put Delta management and its pilots union on the same side again in opposing the unsolicited offer.
The union's support of Delta's stand-alone plan could give management a boost with the company's creditors' committee in its bankruptcy case.
"We have a common threat from outside Delta Air Lines," the chairman of the pilots union's executive committee, Lee Moak, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
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The union is concerned about further job and benefit cuts if US Airways buys the Atlanta-based company. It also is worried about routes being dropped, and it believes higher ticket prices will result from the deal.
Moak told fellow pilots in a memo Tuesday that "should this merger be as misguided and as poor an idea as I currently believe it to be, then I will deploy every available resource to stop it."
But can he?
"They do have a stake, but probably not enough to block it," Ray Neidl, an airline analyst with Calyon Securities in New York, said of the pilots union.
But, Neidl added, "You do want to have the cooperation of the employees" if you are US Airways.
The Delta chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association negotiated a $2.1 billion unsecured claim as part of its most recent agreement to accept pay cuts and to not stand in the way of pension termination. The union has a seat on the nine-member creditors committee. Representatives of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., Coca-Cola and Boeing are among other members of the committee.