U.S. SUPREME COURT ALLOWS DELTA-WESTERN MERGER

  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day
  O'Connor early this morning lifted an Appeals Court injunction
  blocking the planned merger of Delta &lt;DAL> Airlines
  Inc and Western Airlines &lt;WAL>, the Court said.
      O'Connor's action came hours after a three-judge panel of
  the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had
  blocked the merger until a dispute over union representation
  had been settled by arbitration.
      A Supreme Court spokesman said O'Connor granted a stay of
  the injuction, allowing the merger, worth nearly 860 mln dlrs,
  to go through as planned later today.
      The Supreme Court spokesman provided no other details. Each
  of the nine Supreme Court justices has jurisdiction over a
  particular regional Appellate circuit and has the power to
  provisionally overturn its rulings without comment.
      The Appeals Court ruling surprised officials of
  Atlanta-based Delta, which had been preparing for the merger
  for months and had already painted Delta logos on airplanes
  belonging to Western, which has headquartera in Los Angeles.
      "Our plans were to finalize the merger at midnight tonight,"
  Delta spokesman Bill Berry told the Atlanta Constitution late
  last night. "There was really very little that remained to be
  done."
      The ruling in San Francisco came in a lawsuit that had been
  filed in a Los Angeles federal court in which the Air Transport
  Employees union sought to force Western's management to fulfill
  a promise that it would honor union contracts if a merger took
  place.
      The airlines argued that Western's promise could not be
  enforced in a takeover by a larger company.
      After learning of the appeals court ruling, Delta officials
  last night spread the word by telephone that Western employees
  should report for work today in their old uniforms, not in new
  Delta outfits.
      Delta announced last September that it was purchasing
  Western. The merger took place in December, and Western has
  been operated as a Delta subsidiary since then. The Western
  name was to have disappeared at midnight last night.
      At issue is whether the Western unions would continue to
  represent Western employees after the integration of the two
  airlines.
      While all but eight pct of Western's 11,000 employees are
  unionized, only Delta's pilots are union members.
      Delta had maintained that the three unions having contracts
  with Western -- The Association of Flight Attendants and the
  Teamsters, as well as the Air Transport Employees -- would be
  "extinguished" after today.
  

