The signs started appearing after they announced the Air Tax increase: on the walls outside the big commissaries, in the bathrooms, the vehicle bays, places workers go but Shareholders never see. Most of them were fairly restrained, civil, and they stayed up; nobody wanted to get fired, and management didn’t want to seem heavy-handed.
It wasn’t until they announced the pay increases — only two percent for contract full-timers, one percent for everybody else — that the signs started to get threatening. And instead of paper, they’d be painted right on the duroplast. Management couldn’t take them down, because it’d take a work crew, and the crews wouldn’t do it.
When Bobby McNeary was caught mid-application of a particularly incendiary slogan, and ended up beaten to within an inch of his life by Security (who were already exempt from the air tax and got a five percent bump in pay), things quickly got out of hand.
I don’t know if you saw video, but a riot at one-sixth Earth gravity is a bad idea, especially when people are swinging metal tools. I saw one hack get flipped end-over-end courtesy a steel pipe to the chin.
But at least they’re negotiating now.
