German building industry workers go on first strike in years
The first strike in Germany's construction industry in about two decades began on Monday as workers demanded higher wages.
More than 1,000 construction workers stopped work in the state of Lower Saxony at the start of the nationwide wave of strikes, according to the trade union IG Bauen-Agrar-Umwelt (IG BAU).
Additionally, 300 workers came to a rally in Osnabrück and a further 150 to a smaller one in Langenhagen near Hanover, the union said.
The strike is to be continued on Tuesday and extended to other regions. Then there will be selective actions throughout Germany, IG BAU announced.
The walkout came after the breakdown of wage arbitration talks in the primary construction sector with its 930,000 employees, at the beginning of May.
After three unsuccessful rounds of negotiations, the arbitrator Rainer Schlegel proposed two-stage wage increases on April 19.
Initially, wages were to rise by €250 ($270) across the board as of May and then by a further 4% 11 months later.
While IG BAU accepted the compromise proposal, the employers' organizations rejected it at the beginning of May. The strike is now back to the original demand of €500 more per month.
According to the union, Lower Saxony was chosen for the start of the nationwide strike because the employers there, together with some other regions, had prevented the implementation of the conciliation agreement.
The last strike in the construction industry was in 2007, when it was regionally limited to the German states of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony. Prior to that, the last nationwide strike took place in 2002.
