Counter-strike!

by Karl

As I wrote on Sunday, there's a strike planned for this coming Thursday. It was originally scheduled for Monday (yesterday), from 3:00am to 4:00pm, but there was an injunction, so the unions moved it to Thursday and plan for it to be 24 hours, midnight to midnight. Trains will stop, presumably at the last station before midnight, and start up from there early Friday morning. (The railways management is planning to use the day for some maintenance work that's hard to get to while the trains are on their normal schedule. It looks like the unions will agree, since this work wouldn't violate the spirit of messing up life for the public.)

The latest development is that some subway riders are planning a strike of their own, which is being organized by a man who's described in the newspaper article as a café owner.  On the subway, when you reach the end of one of the subway lines, a voice comes on and announces, first in Czech but then again in English, "Terminal station.  Please exit the train."   The strike declaration reads, in part, "We, the customers of the Transit Authority of the capital city Prague, don't consent to the limitation of prepaid services.  We will protest against this limitation by a travelers' strike: we won't disembark at the Dejvická station."  On Wednesday night they plan to catch the last subway out of downtown's Můstek station, and when they reach the end of the line at Dejvická, they simply won't get off.

"The transit authorities are preparing for the event.  'If the strike takes place, employees of the transit authority will certainly be on hand.  If the travelers repeatedly fail to heed the call to get off the train, the city police will intervene,' said Martina Neckářová from the transit authority's press department."

The unions' slogan is, "We're striking for you!", the argument being that the proposed pension changes are bad for most people, so the unions are helping everybody by obstructing them.  The counter-strikers have adopted the obvious slogan, "You're not striking for me!", and they've set up a Facebook page (Shades of the Arab Spring!).  Supposedly there were 40,000 people signed up to the page by Tuesday morning.  In a counter-counter-strike move, somebody has set up another Facebook page, "Organization against the organization you're not striking for me."  The subtitle at this new page reads, "Everyone sets up nonsense organizations and pages here, so why not?"

It's a face(book)-off. We're just waiting for the puck to drop.