(BRUSSELS) - The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) launched a drive for higher wages on Wednesday, arguing that corporate fat cats were ill-placed to call for moderation.

The initiative will culminate on April 5 with 30,000-40,000 people from across Europe expected to march in Ljubljana during a meeting of EU finance ministers and ECB governors near the Slovenian capital.

"We want a pay rise, we want it soon, we want it quickly and we want more equality in pay," said John Monks, general secretary of the ETUC, an umbrella group for European trade unions.

"Europe's workers deserve a lot better than they're getting at the moment and a lot of people at the top of the business community actually deserve a lot less," he told journalists in Brussels.

Monks stressed that wide-reaching pay rises were due because the share of wages in European gross domestic product had been declining in recent years while the share of profits had been growing.

On top of that, record eurozone inflation has been eating into workers' purchasing power.

"We can't do much about oil prices, we can't do much about food prices, but we can do something about how much people are paid," Monks said.

The drive risks putting unions on a collision course with the European Central Bank which has said it will not tolerate inflationary pressures fuelled by a rapid growth in wages.

But Monks dismissed such concerns, arguing that the call for pay moderation needed "to be directed to the boardroom, the people at the top who are getting the huge rises and bonuses."

The launch of the initiative came after the German trade union IG Metall and steel companies agreed late Tuesday to a 5.2-percent pay raise for steel workers, in wage negotiations widely watched by unions and bosses elsewhere in Europe.

Monks said that the campaign for higher wages "will go on as long as it takes for Europe's workers to get a fair deal."

He stressed that broad-based pay hikes would not jeopardise increasingly feeble-looking economic growth in Europe, but would rather give a needed boost to European consumers just as they are beginning to tighten their belts.

"We think that Europe needs to consume more," he said, adding that Europe could not count on US consumption to fuel European growth with the US economy lurching towards recession.

However, he acknowledged that there was "some risk to inflation" if wages were broadly lifted.

Thanks to strong productivity growth in recent years, Monks' advisor Ronald Janssen insisted "there is room for wages to accelerate without inflation pressure."

More generally, Monks said that if Europe did not pay more attention to social issues then Europeans would increasingly turn to protectionism as answer to their problems.

"If there is no lively social dimension people are going to say 'we're going to be protectionist'," he warned.

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