Anyway...
Lacking a broader political re-alignment nationwide away from the right, probably the best a union can do in this situation is what you described as the devious Gotbaum course. At some point, the members themselves and the organization as a whole are going to come to a decision about where to draw the line, whether for full pay to the last day, or retreat and live to fight another day, or somewhere in between. But traditional labor radicals (a mix of trotskyism and old-fashioned blue-collar grit that has plenty of accomplishments and victories to its name) don't necessarily have an answer for what to do in these situations because more militancy or more democracy cannot by itself change the larger political and economic contexts.
I think it is true that a fight directed at the larger financial instiutions involved might help (I recall reading that in the 76 NYC crisis the powers that be were most disturbed and agitated at some early raucous demos that happened on wall street and outside the banks themselves--- a tactic that was dropped by the union leadership); but in a country where political contests between the center and right are mostly won by the right and the center moves further right every couple years, and where all sectors of the working class have absorbed sustained losses for decades without yet any authentically mass rebirth of broadly-felt discontent, will a march on wall street change the mathematics involved in chrystler's situation? It might help the union's bargaining position, maybe they should do it, maybe they can position themselves better in the public view than they have in past conflicts like this--- but at the end of the day, the bottom-line math of some struggles simply spell defeat, whether of greater magnitude or smaller.
This is why reformist political movement away from the far-right is an indispensable part of any equation for positive social change of any magnitude.
> No, though the more devious thing to do would be to posture
> militantly in public while cutting deals in private, a la Victor
> Gotbaum during the NYC fiscal crisis.
>
> I really don't know what I'd do were I in their shoes. I've never
> gotten a good answer out of labor radicals, who can't get more
> specific than "resist!"
>
>