BERLIN, Jan 15, 2008 (AFP) - After a David and Goliath battle waged over many months, a German train drivers' union has extracted a promise of a separate wage agreement from Deutsche Bahn in the latest blow to the country's post-war labour model.

The dispute between GDL and the state-owned Deutsche Bahn began early last year and triggered what the rail operator termed the longest conflict in its history when 5,000 drivers walked off the job repeatedly late in the year.

On Monday at last, most commentators declared GDL the winner when Deutsche Bahn went back on its vow never to cede to the relatively small union's stubborn demand for its own collective contract.

Though the details still have to be worked out and the deal inked by the end of the month, the employers are also understood to have agreed to salary increases of up to 11 percent.

Holger Lengfel, a sociology professor at Hagen University in western Germany, said the strike will go down in the annals of labour relations.

'By securing their own collective contract the train drivers have toppled a pillar of Germany's wage politics -- one union for all whether they drive the trains, clean the tracks or sell the tickets,' he wrote recently.

Nobel economics laureate Reinhard Selten from Bonn University said German trade unions are unique in that they tend to seek bigger wage increases for lower-earning members, which tends to reduce the salary gap.

GDL has been accused of breaking with this time-honoured tradition and dealing a blow to workers' solidarity.

The federation of German trade unions, DGB, repeatedly criticised GDL for taking a lone road, refusing to settle for the wage contract concluded between the company and the country's two largest rail unions, Transnet and DBGA.

Wage unity was being sacrificed for the sake of the drivers' demands, it said.

DGB boss Michael Sommer recalled the historical context to half a century of trade union tradition.

The post-war aim, he said, was to create big powerful unions, unlike the ones before the war that were unable to stand up to the Nazis.

This new type of union has been a key element of Germany's so-called economic miracle because it made labour relations predictable.

Employers could work out the cost of their workforce and count on stable labour relations once the wage deal had been concluded with a particular industry.

But GDL has not been the first union to throw a spanner in the works.

The pilots' union Cockpit challenged the system in 2001 and air controllers later followed suit. In 2006 came the turn of disgruntled doctors represented by the Marburger Bund.

Lengfel said small, plucky trade unions sprang up in fields where workers felt they were being sold short.

The big unions have become 'salary levelling machines' and it is only by leaving the fold that these professionals will feel they are getting a fair deal, he said.

The challenge to the system comes as at a time when big unions are steadily losing members.

DGB, which counts Verdi and IG Metall among its members, shed 40 percent of its membership between 1991 and last year.

Lengfel laid the problem not at the door of workers but rather employers. He said by demanding ever more flexibility from staff in the past 15 years, both in terms of pay and hours, they have chipped away at their staff's loyalty.

The professor said the change in the labour model is irreversible and the train drivers' example will spread to more and more professions, with the next ones possibly being nursing and pre-school teaching.

Die Welt newspaper remarked that the big trade unions' only hope of slowing down the wheels of change would be fight harder to defend the interests of all the workers they represent.