"...Why we need professional negotiators..."
Manager,
So the professional negotiators would have done... what? Shown us the formulas to establish to us why management thought we were on the wrong end of the leverage? The paper explains why were bound to let ourselves get screwed, doesn't it?
A professional negotiator would probably be professional enough to understand we weren't in a winning situation. In that case, would it have been his/her duty to negotiate based on the existing situation, and maybe gotten us a worse outcome, depending on how defeatist or realist they might feel? Or do you maybe think he/she would have dazzled the company with some Jerry Maguire kind of stuff, and fooled them into thinking we weren't actually screwed?
The only leverage that mattered in this case was our ability to picket the right spots, and make the right noise in the press to inject doubt about our willingness to play along. Having people on the picket line demonstrated this. A guy in a suit saying we would walk... maybe would be convincing, or maybe not at all. I'd rather rely on Delta pilots with picket signs.