With U.S. airline executives meeting this week with President Donald Trump, the White House appears skeptical about a push by carriers and their unions to block competition from a European airline.

Pilot unions in particular want Trump to overturn an Obama administration decision that allows European budget airline Norwegian Air Shuttle to expand service to the U.S. through an Irish subsidiary. Unions say the subsidiary would skirt labor laws and threaten U.S. jobs.

But this week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested that the country would benefit from the arrangement. He said U.S. workers would build the planes and service them.

Anders Lindsrom said Norwegian has 500 crew members based in the U.S. and is the only foreign airline recruiting U.S. pilots. The airline has 120 Boeing planes now and has orders for another 120, he said.

Norwegian seeks to undercut competitors through lower labor costs, said Dan Carey, president of the pilots' union at American Airlines.

Allowing it to expand “runs completely counter to President Trump's pledge to put U.S. workers' interests first” and could “destroy a great many U.S. jobs,” he said.

Dow, DuPont willing to pare units

Dow Chemical and DuPont say they're willing to make more business divestments as a way to nudge European regulators who remain wary of their proposed merger.

The companies plan to join in a $62 billion deal and then break apart into three separate, publicly traded companies. The companies would focus on agriculture, material science and the production and sale of specialty products, respectively. Antitrust regulators remain hesitant, however.

Dow spokeswoman Rachelle Schikorra said Wednesday that among the concessions the companies are willing to make are the sale of part of DuPont's crop protection business and the sale of Dow Chemical's acid copolymers and ionomers business.

VW board rebuts ex-chairman

Volkswagen's diesel scandal took a rancorous turn Wednesday when the board of directors denied news reports that former chairman Ferdinand Piech had given four members early warning about the U.S. probe into emissions cheating.

The board issued a statement that the four members “rejected all assertions made by Ferdinand Piech as untrue.”

The reports, in the form of a pre-release of an article from the Bild am Sonntag newspaper and on the Spiegel Online website, say Piech told German prosecutors that he learned of the probe from an informant.

Piech then told the four board members, according to the reports.