(BERLIN) - Germany's governing so-called "grand coalition" wants to continue restricting free access to workers from new EU members in Eastern Europe until 2011, a newspaper report said on Friday.

In 2005, Germany, Europe's biggest economy, persuaded Brussels to allow it to impose restrictions until 2009 because of fears that a flood of cheap labour would put Germans out of work.

It also obtained the possibility of a two-year extension.

The steering committee of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) has now "agreed on the extension," the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung cited committee head Karl-Josef Laumann as saying.

In February German Labour Minister Olaf Scholz, from the CDU's centre-left coalition partners the Social Democrats (SPD), had said he was also in favour of such a move.

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