By MICHELINE MAYNARD

The hottest seats in the airline industry this summer will be at the bargaining table, where labor leaders and company executives now face an agonizing choice: wait or leap.

Waiting means biding time to see what happens at United Airlines. United, a UAL Corporation unit, failed on Monday to win federal loan guarantees and must now try to persuade its workers to accept substantial new cuts in wages and benefits so it can attract lenders willing to finance its emergence from bankruptcy protection.

United has not yet said how much it will need. Any major cuts in labor costs at the airline, where workers have already accepted reductions worth $2.5 billion a year, will put pressure on the executives of rival carriers to get similar savings, analysts said.

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