Friday, August 12, 2005
From gold to trash
I'm all for the right to strike, especially against employers or companies that pay feeble wages, but when the strikers start trashing the streets, it stops being cool.
Yesterday, leaving Johannesburg city centre, I was approaching a robot when a mob decided to neatly block of my progress with a barricade of rubbish. The sum of the parts was certainly much more than the whole. A couple of rubbish bags so efficiently blocked the road that I had to turn back and take a different route. I thought if the police can go roaring after strikers down a one-way, then I can go quietly down a one-way away from the strikers.
So now all this has to be cleaned up by the poor municipal workers who are just returning to work after their own strike, which happened to be equally trashy. Absurd.
Yesterday, leaving Johannesburg city centre, I was approaching a robot when a mob decided to neatly block of my progress with a barricade of rubbish. The sum of the parts was certainly much more than the whole. A couple of rubbish bags so efficiently blocked the road that I had to turn back and take a different route. I thought if the police can go roaring after strikers down a one-way, then I can go quietly down a one-way away from the strikers.
So now all this has to be cleaned up by the poor municipal workers who are just returning to work after their own strike, which happened to be equally trashy. Absurd.