BERLIN -- German workers, with the world's highest wages and shortest work week, may have been too busy on their six weeks' annual holiday to notice that for the first time in decades Germany had more strikes in 1992 than Britain.


With a wave of strikes bearing down on Germany for a third straight year, politicians, industrialists and analysts worry that the labor strife may leave permanent scars on the economy, further eroding its flagging competitiveness and stifling a fragile recovery.


"Germany is still far away from catching the 'British disease'," said Claus Schnabel, a senior economist at the Institute for German Economics, referring to Britain's frequent and sometimes violent labor disputes in the 1970s.


"But there is clearly a trend towards more strikes in Germany and far fewer strikes in Britain," he added. "With less money to go around, Germany is facing a very difficult economic period and an increased probability of strikes."


According to the latest figures, German manufacturers lost 61 working days per 1,000 employees in 1992 to strikes compared to just 24 in Britain -- a startling reversal from past years.


As recently as in 1989, for example, four days per 1,000 employees were lost to strikes in Germany and 182 in Britain. During the 1970s and 1980s, the average number of days lost in Britain was 10 times the amount in Germany.


With the economy struggling to climb out of the deepest post-World War II recession and unemployment climbing above four million as industry shifts thousands of jobs abroad, Germany has been seized by a fear of decline.


Strikes, once rare in Germany, now fill newspapers and the evening news.


Germany lost 850,000 jobs in 1993 and is expected to shed another 500,000 jobs this year. Analysts agree the strikes are the last thing Germany needs.


But the labor unions, whose successful battles for higher wages are at least partially responsible for the depth of the recession, have pressed ahead with claims for higher wages again this year.


The two largest unions -- IG Metall with 3.2 million members and the OeTV transport workers with 2.3 million -- have staged a number of warning strikes in recent weeks and may soon stage full-scale walkouts. IG Metall is confident 100,000 engineering workers voting this week in the target state of Lower Saxony will decide in favor of a strike.


"Strikes and lockouts would in the current situation be poison for employment and for Germany's standing as an industrial location," said Chancellor Helmut Kohl, facing a bumpy ride through 18 state, local and European polls this year ahead of general polls in October.


With his popularity at an all-time low, the historian Kohl is certainly aware of Britain's strike-filled 1979 "winter of discontent" -- when dead bodies couldn't be buried because of a gravediggers' strike -- that helped lift Margaret Thatcher into the prime minister's office.


Although Germany may not have the "British disease," its reputation for industrial tranquillity has deteriorated. Its smugness has also vanished.


"Weren't we Germans amazed in the past by some of the absurd strikes in Britain, strikes like the one over the length of tea breaks?" the Offenbach Post newspaper wrote in an editorial.


Jonathan Hoffman, director of economics at CS First Boston in London, said that aside from the high labor costs, Germany's biggest problem at the moment is its lack of flexibility.


He said harmful and outdated regulations on everything from shopping hours to part-time workers and private job agencies represent a terrible burden for the economy struggling to compete in an increasingly open global market.


"Everything in Germany is done with a consensus," he said. "That's great when the size of the cake is growing each year. But when it has to make rapid or even radical adjustments, it runs into trouble. It moves at too glacial a pace."


German workers led the industrialized world in 1992, costing employers nearly 42 marks per hour. They also worked 1,519 hours, which is 488 hours less than Japanese and 338 less than American workers.