Signs at protests in Prague and other university cities yesterday in favor of more funding foracademicians said in Czech, “No more cheap labor.” The ČMKOS labor union used the sameslogan starting in 2015, but it had mainly blue-collar workers in mind. ČMKOS union bossJosef Středula told HN in 2017 that we must extract ourselves from this cheap-wage situationand cannot have the goal of remaining a low-cost country. Yet Handelsblatt quoted ChairKlaus Zellmer of Škoda Auto last week as saying that Škoda’s biggest advantage withinVolkswagen is its cost-efficiency. He didn’t mean just the obvious blue-collar wage advantage. “Sources in the company say that an hour’s development work at Škoda’s main plant inMladá Boleslav costs about a third of the hourly rate in Wolfsburg,” Handelsblatt reported.Yesterday’s protest suggests that if the CR wants to become a higher value-added economy,employers might have to add more value to the paychecks of their white-collar workers.

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