Bonn Agrees to New Talks as Strikes Disrupt Air Connections

Faced with widening strikes that disrupted international air traffic today, the German government on Monday agreed to reopen negotiations with public workers in hopes of ending the country’s worst postwar labor dispute.

The Interior Ministry announced that it will sweeten its offer of 4.8% pay boosts when both sides meet Wednesday in Stuttgart.

No new figure was disclosed, but the union previously had approved a mediator’s compromise of 5.4%, which the government rejected last month, citing the soaring costs of German unification as the reason.

“This is the first signal that employers are prepared to de-escalate the conflict they provoked,” said union chairwoman Monika Wulf-Mathies.

But the prospect of new talks did not prompt the union to call off a paralyzing walkout today at Frankfurt International airport, continental Europe’s busiest.

Ground personnel and firefighters joined colleagues who shut down or crippled several German airports on Monday.

Thousands of disgruntled passengers were bused Monday to airports in Amsterdam or Brussels for rerouting. In Berlin, flights were detoured through Schoenefeld Airport in the formerly Communist eastern sector, which was not striking.

The national airline Lufthansa said Monday’s action caused more than 200 canceled flights affecting 15,000 passengers.

“If Frankfurt is shut down, the daily loss would add up to double-digit millions for Lufthansa alone,” an unidentified airline official was quoted as telling the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur before the airport was brought to a standstill today.

Frankfurt’s airport is one of the busiest in the world. About 30 million passengers pass through each year.

The union said that more than 200,000 employees are taking part in the scattered strikes this week. This is double the number of workers who began the walkouts eight days ago.

The strike has disrupted mail delivery, trash collection and public transportation in the western part of the country.

Eastern Germans negotiate separately and are not officially part of the strike, although transportation workers in eastern Berlin joined Monday’s stoppages as a show of solidarity.

Health officials have reported no serious sanitation problems yet as garbage piles up on Germany’s normally pristine sidewalks.