Some 52,000 employees took to the streets on Thursday in Germany to increase pressure on current wage negotiations. The trade union Verdi said the strikes mainly affected public commuter transportation in Baden-Wuerttemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia.

Workers also downed tools at the Dusseldorf and Cologne/Bonn airports. In Baden-Wuerttemberg, day care facilities, garbage collection and public administration offices remained closed.

"Employers seem to enjoy not making headway," Verdi head Frank Bsirske told protestors in Dortmund on Thursday. But negotiations had to move forward, he said.

"Otherwise, we'll come again and then we won't just keep it at warning strikes," he said. Unions are demanding a five percent wage increase, which employers consider much too high. Talks broke down on Monday evening.

Already on Wednesday, some 22,000 public service workers did not go to work.

More strikes planned

The secretary-general of the Christian Democratic Union Hermann Groehe criticized the union demands as excessive, considering the current economic situation.

"We're coming out of a year of a massive economic collapse, and we're just getting back on our feet," Groehe told the newspaper Berliner Zeitung on Thursday. "In view of the demands for five percent more wages, a lot of people who are struggling with an uncertain work situation and who have to make do with low wage increases will just be shaking their heads."

Verdi has called on several thousand employees in Hesse, Saarland, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt to strike on Friday. Wage negotiations between the union and public employers are supposed to resume on February 10 in Potsdam.

sac/bk/dpa/AFP/apn
Editor: Rob Turner