By Katie Allen
BERLIN, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Germany's largest industrial union, IG Metall, said on Wednesday it was planning a wave of brief warning strikes in several German states from Thursday to pressure employers in a row over pay and working hours.
IG Metall said it had failed to reach a deal with employers and would stage stoppages at around 20 factories including, plants belonging to car manufacturer DaimlerChrysler and steel and engineering firm ThyssenKrupp .
The trade union, which represents 3.5 million engineering workers, has been at loggerheads with employers since last week when they offered IG Metall less than half the four percent rise it is demanding.
Negotiating rules require the union to avoid strikes until 2300 GMT on Wednesday when an "industrial peace" period expires.
IG Metall said it planned strikes lasting around an hour as soon as the deadline expires, or at the start of early shifts in the states of Hesse, Bavaria, Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Wuerttemberg and Lower Saxony.
IG Metall spokeswoman Martina Helmerich said the stoppages, a frequent feature of German wage rounds, should not be seen as setting the tone for the rest of negotiations.
"We don't want to heat things up with strikes. At the moment it is the instrument we are using but it doesn't mean we can't be reasonable and sit down and talk with employers," she said.
Martin Kannegiesser, president of employers group Gesamtmetall, said the union's plans to strike endangered Germany's tradition of wage bargaining without government interference.
"If IG Metall follows through on its strike threats, then it will be a bad signal," he told the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper. "It would show how incapable we are in Germany, when we are in a difficult economic situation, to sensibly adapt institutional rules like wage autonomy."
The next round of wage talks in Baden-Wuerttemberg, which traditionally leads pay negotiations for the rest of the country and where both Porsche and DaimlerChrysler are based, are scheduled for February 5.