NEWS ANALYSIS : Tensions of German Unity Cloud Metalworkers Settlement : Labor: Differing experiences fuel suspicions between western union leaders, eastern members.

Reluctance among local eastern German metalworkers union officials to accept a compromise wage settlement worked out by their national leadership reflects the depth and severity of new social tensions that have become part of reunified Germany.

In part, the delay that followed last week’s announcement of agreement is understandable. After all, more than 60 years and two dictatorships have passed since the last official strike in the region.

But in its own way, the local resistance to embracing what most independent observers have assessed as a clear union victory underscores a hard reality in the new Germany: The strains of unification remain a powerful force.

After days of often bitter internal debate, local union leaders in the last of five eastern German states reluctantly agreed late Tuesday to submit the accord for ratification by rank-and-file members. Since only 25% approval is required to ratify, the ballot is largely a formality.

However, local union officials in the steel sector have rejected the compromise formula entirely.

Such internal differences within the trade union movement are unusual in western Germany.

“The union rank and file (in western Germany) has almost always been loyal and showed solidarity with its leadership,” noted Marks Scheuer, a labor relations specialist at the Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Economic Research in Essen.

In part, the problem in the current strike has been one of suspicion--suspicion on the part of eastern local union officials about the way the western-dominated leadership of the giant IG Metall metalworkers union pressed its attack, then called for a cease-fire when it appeared to have the employers in full retreat.

But like other eastern and western Germans, the union’s western leadership and its eastern German members are also separated by vastly differing experiences.

“Western workers have grown up with the understanding that profits have to be earned before they can be distributed, but in the east, they can’t get beyond the social justice issue,” Scheuer said.

For anyone who has listened to workers’ comments and tested the mood along the picket lines during the last two weeks, it is also clear that the stakes in the present dispute involve more than just a new wage contract. They also include a test of the country’s much-envied shop-floor consensus--a consensus that once served as a cornerstone of West Germany’s famed “economic miracle” and later as guarantor of the country’s enormous material success.

Despite the dissatisfaction, the strike appears to have brought major gains for the eastern metalworkers.

The proposed settlement gives them a 26% pay increase by the end of the year and a timetable for lifting their wages to western levels by mid-1997 at the latest.