Rent a Protester

According to the BBC a new service is available in Germany where you can hire people to join your protest rally.

If your fellow protesters are too old to protest for hours, or too ugly to give your cause the right ambiance, or perhaps there are simply too few of you who really care, then you can go to these people and hire some people to shout out for your cause.


Further reading:

• BBC News article: Protesters-R-Us
• Rental website: Demonstrant mieten und vermieten

Christ Almighty, if you're too lazy to even fight your own battles...

Blasted freemarket capitalists! In the good ol' days when trade unions organized major strikes all they had to do was buy union members off with a packed lunch and a train ticket to go for a stroll through town (demonstrate).

Why bother renting? Just get a load of French people. They love a good protest, and would do it for free.

@JW- apparently the SED party in East Germany used to do the same thing. My father-in-law said they'd get 8 Marks to go walk down the street no further than the length of a football field (but long enough to be on TV) and protest. Then they'd all fuck off to the pub and drink their profits.

Is your soul up for sale?

They wouldn't look right at a pensioners rally for higher pensions, subsidised bus fares and the like, would they?

there is a well documented case from 2006 where the German doctors hired these guys to protest against their work conditions in Berlin. It was not a very popular move by the doctors but at the same time it got a lot of media coverage...

Is protesting really not about showing your own motivation for a cause? As in "this bothers me so much I am going to take to the streets"...anything else is just unconvincing

Interestingly, the picture shown by the BBC is of a protests by GP doctors rather than a radical political or working class protest.

Some groups, parties and unions do fairly do down organised set piece protests and maybe they do use such people. But I think its more used by lobbyist groups. Indeed the pictures of the people seem "nice" to a large extent and they are described as "promoters" as well as demonstrators.

But its given a formal coating to the lie that those who do take part in demonstrations are all "rent a mob";

Hmmm...reminds me a bit of this site www.rentagerman.de

Protests will and should now be ignored.

Before, a protest usually meant it was a popular cause. Even though many like to protest for the fun of it anyway. But now, people are there, even if they are against the cause. They'll get money for it.