Phil Entwistle, a BAE Systems employee of 32 years, puts it bluntly: "It's easier for us to be the whipping boys." As executives, ministers and civil servants in London, Paris and Berlin grapple with the permutations of the £30bn super-merger between BAE Systems and EADS, thousands of staff in Lancashire are hoping their voices will be heard in the maelstrom.

Entwistle, 48, is one of 35,000 UK staff at BAE who want guarantees that jobs at Britain's biggest manufacturing employer will not be sacrificed in the wake of a merger with the Franco-German owner of Airbus.

Based at BAE's Samlesbury plant and a toolmaker by trade, Entwistle expects to be involved in discussions over the deal as the lead shop steward for Unite at the plant. He wants to see BAE's manufacturing work on the Eurofighter Typhoon jet, the US-led F-35 joint strike fighter and the Hawk jet training aircraft stay in the UK.

"We want assurances through the government that if this goes ahead, the design and manufacturing in the UK for Typhoon, F-35 and Hawk, and our jobs, are not suddenly moved abroad," he says. "They have a lot more rules abroad that make it more difficult to move work out of Germany and out of France."

Entwistle then turns to the pervasive unease over state procurement and manufacturing policy – for all the talk of a march of the makers – that peaked with the decision last year to select Siemens of Germany over Bombardier in Derby for the £1.4bn Thameslink trains contract. "The rules of our government make it far easier to get rid of our jobs than European workers' jobs," he says, pointing out that his colleagues have been through four rounds of redundancies in four years.

Entwistle may be justified in worrying that the noise generated in thrashing out a deal of such complexity will drown out concerned voices. This is not a straightforward commercial transaction.

Closer to home, BAE staff appear to have the implicit support of the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, who said last week that the government would stand by its "golden share" in BAE and seek assurances over security and jobs.

"We will want to be reassured not just about security implications, but about implications for the future allocation of work to the UK. It's not just military work but Airbus work," he said, referring to the 17,000 people EADS employs in the UK, including 6,000 at the Airbus wings site in Broughton, north Wales.

Separately, competition rules mean that business secretary Vince Cable must make a quasi-judicial ruling about whether to refer the mooted merger to the Competition Commission on grounds of a threat to national security.

Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, says: "My concern would be what impact will this have on the sector, and on our ability to be a world leader. Is this going to damage investment in research and development in this country?"

He adds that the government should be using its procurement powers better, as part of its industrial strategy. "If you look at defence, where we can be globally competitive, the government has simply said that they're going to buy products off the shelf from the US."

Pull back from British shores, however, and concerns escalate further. This is a potent geopolitical cocktail that must be made palatable to a broad array of stakeholders by 10 October. EADS shareholders, who will emerge with 60% of the combined business, are concerned that they are giving away too much value. The US government, BAE's biggest single customer, will harbour concerns over EADS having access to its military hardware, while the French and German governments are likely to demand a say in the nationality of the holding company chief executive, as well as the head office location.

Indeed, the three countries at the centre of this deal – France, Germany and the UK – will all want their security and economic interests protected before allowing it to go ahead. Entwistle is not alone.

In France, where Airbus is headquartered, news of the merger came as a total shock to workers, who said it was a "bolt from the blue". "We were not made aware of this project, which we learned about from the press. Our first reaction is one of anger over the way the staff have been treated," says Jean-Jacques Desvignes, co-ordinator for the powerful CGT union.

Philippe Fraysse of Force Ouvrière, the main union at Airbus, says it will "stay extremely vigilant", and that creating jobs is the number one priority. "We will be questioning the management. We don't want it turning into an Anglo-Saxon-style management," he says.

EADS is made up of Airbus, the Eurocopter helicopter business, the German-based Cassidian defence business, and the Astrium space systems business. It employs about 133,000 people and a combined BAE/EADS would have more than 220,000 staff.

The timing of the announcement was said to have taken the French government by surprise, even though the Elysée would have been aware of the talks, as a shareholder in EADS. (The French state and Lagardère, the Gallic conglomerate, own 22.35% of the business; Germany, through the Daimler car manufacturing business, controls a further 22.35%.) Patricia Adam, the Socialist president of the defence commission at the Assemblée Nationale, says the news was released before a definitive agreement had been reached.

"The announcement was not made at the initiative of these two large European enterprises, if I understand correctly. Clearly, there was a leak," she says. "For the Defence Commission, what is important is to verify that the interests of the state as shareholder are respected, but also the state as customer."

The German government reacted soberly to the news, saying only that it was following the negotiations closely and was being kept informed of developments. A spokesman for the economics ministry said that it was holding "constructive talks" with all parties, while Chancellor Angela Merkel – not known as a woman to mince her words – simply said: "It will be looked at closely."

Yet behind closed doors there are signs that much more in-depth discussion is going on. The German economics minister Philipp Rösler and Merkel are reportedly far from giving their blessing to the deal. Considerable reservations are being expressed over the logic of a merger, leading to much speculation that Merkel might ultimately decide against it.

According to speculation in Germany's financial press on Friday, technocrats are concerned about the completion of a deal between two such different organisations. The Süddeutsche Zeitung said: "Some are questioning the sense of a healthy aircraft company, which is overwhelmingly active in the field of civil aviation, merging with a problematic armaments company."

Added to that is the highly complex ownership profile of German- and French-owned EADS, which has a part-state, part private shareholder structure. Bringing a British company into the mix, along with the participation of the UK government, would further complicate the situation. A merger, the paper suggested, would inevitably weaken the influence of the German government – which, like the French and British administrations, has its own security strategy and finds it useful to be involved in the business.

Handelsblatt, the leading German financial daily, said that one of the main advantages for EADS of a merger with BAE would be the "backdoor access to the Pentagon" that it could give the company. However, the use of the word "backdoor" underlines why the American security establishment, like Entwistle and his colleagues, might quail at this transaction.