World IN BRIEF : WESTERN EUROPE : ‘Eurocrats’ Strike to Protect Salaries

European Community bureaucrats, among the most handsomely paid of their kind in the world, began a two-day strike to retain that status. Many of the 25,000 “Eurocrats” stayed away from their jobs and sharply curtailed EC activities in Brussels. In Luxembourg, pickets demonstrated outside but did not disrupt a meeting of EC foreign ministers discussing ways to establish a common foreign and defense policy for the 12 countries. Officials of the five unions that organized the strike argued that the EC constitution called for better pay for Eurocrats than national bureaucrats.