Union Ends Four-Week East German Strike

Union leaders on Saturday halted a four-week-old strike by thousands of east German manufacturing workers after the collapse of talks about shorter working hours, saying that the increasingly unpopular stoppages had proved ineffective.

Emerging from all-night negotiations with employers, officials from the IG Metall industrial workers union said the walkouts, which have hobbled automakers such as Volkswagen and BMW, had failed to bring them closer to their goal.

“The bitter truth is that the strike has failed,” IG Metall boss Klaus Zwickel said, acknowledging also that public opinion had turned against the strike.

The union had called out workers in about a dozen factories in the southeastern state of Saxony and the Berlin region every day for the past four weeks to press for a cut in the work week for about 310,000 industrial workers in the former communist east from 38 hours to 35 – the same as in the wealthier west.

Employers have refused, saying the extra hours – for the same basic pay – was a magnet for badly needed investment in the still-depressed region, especially as former communist countries in eastern Europe with even lower wages prepare to join the European Union next year.

During 16 hours of talks that ended early Saturday, employers proposed allowing firms to set weekly hours of between 35 and 40 hours, depending on their financial strength. IG Metall rejected that, suggesting instead that the reduction to 35 hours be phased in over a period determined by each individual company.

Having failed to reach a deal covering the whole sector, the union said it would continue seek work-time reductions on a company-by-company basis.

The union argues that productivity has improved sufficiently since German reunification in 1990 for companies to even out working conditions. Employers counter that ending the extra incentive for firms will hamper efforts to develop the region, where unemployment is twice that in the west of the country.

With the German economy teetering on the brink of recession, government leaders and media commentators have joined the criticism, saying the strike was ill-conceived and badly timed.