Trade unions predict most staff at Airbus sites across Europe will hold protest strikes to increase pressure against the company's so-called "Power8" restructuring scheme.

Such co-ordinated Europe-wide strikes organized by trade unions are highly unusual.

Spat aside, the IG Metall metalworkers' union said thousands of Airbus workers would strike.

"We are assuming that no German airbus employee will work as normal on Friday," union spokesperson Daniel Friedrich said.

The union said they expected some 20,000 demonstrators to converge on the northern city of Hamburg for a rally there.

French accuse Germans

However, according to a report in the French daily, Liberation, a spat has broken out between two powerful French and German unions involved in the strikes.

The trigger was a flyer distributed by the French union, CFE-CGC at the beginning of March. In the letter, the union said that even though the Germans were responsible for the expensive delays for the giant Airbus A380, they were still compensated with a new production line in the Hamburg plant.

According to Liberation, at a meeting in the French city of Toulouse on Wednesday, Germany's IG Metall representative Horst Niehus accused the CFE-CGC of "populism" and "nationalism." The French union reportedly defended the flyer as necessary.

The chairperson of IG Metall, Jutta Blankau, didn't mince words speaking to the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel (Friday edition).

"It is irritating when French unions say that the Germans have pulled a fast one on the French," she said.

Thousands to take to the streets

An earlier day of protest in France in March brought at least 12,000 people into the streets of Toulouse in the southwest France, where Airbus is based. In Friday, workers in Toulouse, Meaulte, Nantes and Saint-Nazaire are expected to strike.

And in Spain, two unions, the CCOO and the UGT, have called on 9,000 workers at seven sites to stop work for an hour in protest.

Airbus parent company EADS has said that the financial crisis at the plane maker is "extremely serious" and that it can no longer delay making cost savings.

The cuts, together with the total or partial disposal of six sites, are intended to save five billion euros ($6.6 billion) by 2010 and pull the company out of a crisis caused by delays to the A380 superjumbo program, seen as critical to Airbus' bid to catch up with US rival Boeing.