I think it's a fair question...

With the strikes that are going on in Wisconsin has the union discussed any alternatives to the Governors request to remove collective bargaining..what has the union stated as possibly giving up in lieu of the right to bargain collectively?

My thought is that if they win the right to continue to bargain a crap load of people will get laid off and in that respect there is not much a union can do....when this happens a large portion of the membership will be ok with it because it may not personally effect them and at that point solidarity goes out the window because the unions would prefer to keep the right to bargain versus a bunch of people losing their jobs...

I don't think the unions will flat out ever say what they are willing to cut rather they would say that they would meet at the table to discuss contract issues. I think if they did make it public what they were willing to cut this would put the governor in a really tuff position...just some thoughts on this subject and I don't think this rally or strike has anything to do with the rest of the world as being in crisis..this is a labor relations issue and a big one at that..I do think that in the future state pensions will be a thing of the past...thoughts?

Eventually if you keep taking things away from a person -- any person --he reaches a stage where ideology doesn't matter: All our poor Everyman knows is that his stuff is getting grabbed by somebody, so he snarlingly reacts in rage. Curiously, it doesn't seem to matter what absolute amount you have, whether you are a homeless guy with half a sandwich or a billionare who is set to lose a few hundred million -- in either situation, the person in question is likely to do whatever they can to hold on to what they have. It is feeling of falling, rather than an absolute decline itself, that creates the panic reaction.

The major banks are perpetually whipped up in a panic reaction of this sort: Their very business model would be impossible without this attitude to mentally lubricate and ooze their slimy way forward. So they are already "there," as it were. The next people to get "there" will be the government, and in this kind of reaction, you can see public-sector reactions to "austerity." The third, and most socially disruptive, phase will be when the grab-wahtever-you-can-and-to-hell-with-everyone-else attitude spreads beyond the financial and public sectors to the general people. The people on the whole are amazingly still narcoticized with all kinds of illusions, but the ability of the magician to keep pulling rabbits out of a hat is drawing to a close, and when it comes, it will come with a fury.

So in answer to the OP's question, I see these struggles as the kicking in of raw survival fear among the public-sector workers. This is stage two of a three-part shift into deeper modulations of rage, following the rage of the financiers and preceeding the rage of the broader public.