Many Greek strikes…to 1 shy Jordanian strike!

I have witnessed many strikes since my first day in Greece. The Greeks are known for their intolerance to the low performance of the Greek government. Also the Greeks will go really mad when their demands are not fulfilled. In Jordan, it was never this way. People were always quite when it came to strikes and are accepting to most governments.

But, today I have received a Facebook invitation to join a group called “Strike in JORDAN”. The person who called for this strike is Anonymous. The creator of the group is asking the people of Jordan to stay at home on the 4^th of May until 11:00am (means skip 2-3 hours of work, I am curious to know the cost the government will bare for this strike). The group is in Arabic, so I translated the list of demands to English:

Demands:

1. Demand the government to put as much effort as possible to stop the increase in prices.
2. Fix prices for Gas and Electricity.
3. Stop selling the belongings (I think he meant “ real estate”) of the country.
4. Provide justice to private sector employees and oblige private sector companies to raise salaries.

How to STRIKE:

“It is requested from all of us not to go to work. Let us stay at home till 11:00am. We are not calling for public strikes in the streets, but we are calling for a simple, peaceful and modern form of strikes to express our misery and sadness that 4 million Jordanian people are living today as per the official statistics……….etc…”.

In disregard for strikes being bad or good, from my observation, I find Greeks to be “strikes oriented” in their culture and for Jordanians they are not.

What do you think?? Do you think that strikes have anything to do with people culture? Or is it more of a political issue?