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Chinese traces in a former Dortmund steel mill, 2003: "Packing firma (company)" - in the lower left corner, a union sticker saying "Steel Round (Bargaining) 1990: It's our turn now - (We demand) 10% pay rise and the 35 hour week"

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Chinese traces in a former Dortmund steel mill, 2003: "China First"

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Union sticker 2003: "35 hour week: In the East, the sun is rising"

Now that East German workers in the metal/automotive industries are on strike to fight for reduced weekly work times (and risk basically everything that has been reached there so far), the above photos come to my mind. I took them just days ago right here in Dortmund where I live, in the now dismantled Westfalenhütte steel mill, once the city's largest employer. Dismantled? Packing company? The entire plant has been knocked down and shipped to China.

After its closure early in 2001, Chinese steel company Shagang purchased all the facilities shut down by ThyssenKrupp Stahl, read, everything you need to produce hot rolled steel: a sinter plant, blast furnaces and the hot strip mill from the Westfalenhütte and the oxygen furnace steel works from the Phoenix plant. Everything got dismantled, knocked down into handy parts, packed into wooden crates and shipped across the seas to somewhere near Shanghai, where the reinstalled facilities will produce 4 million tons of rolled steel for the domestic market, substituting imports. And now, Shagang hit the jackpot and bought the missing link: the Kaiserstuhl coking plant. Situated right in the center of the Westfalenhütte area, commissioned in 1992 and decommissioned just years later, this 1.5 billion Marks plant is the cherry on the Shagang shopping tour cake.

And in Eastern Germany, workers are on strike because two blockhead union leaders claim that their plants are "now competitive enough" to introduce the 35 hour week that is standard in many industries in the Western part. Mr Düvel and Mr Peters don't make too many friends with their course, even not among workers and workers' councils - no wonder, in an area with 20% unemployment rate where the new automotive plants and their suppliers basically are everything they have.