BY MORRIS THOMPSON
 Herald World Staff

 MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's government agreed in principle early Wednesday to pay
 ``special gratuities'' to hundreds of thousands of federal workers when President
 Ernesto Zedillo's term ends, in a deal that ended nearly all the street protests that
 had snarled traffic in cities across the country for three days.

 The payment will be called a special gratuity instead of a bonus, to get around a
 law passed last year that bars term-end bonuses like those handed out by two
 previous Mexican presidents. Term-end payments are in addition to the year-end
 bonuses that Mexican workers traditionally receive.

 Finance Secretary José Angel Gurría said that next Tuesday would be the
 deadline to decide the amount of the payments. How many workers will receive
 them is unclear. The country's political parties are pressing for higher
 compensation for 2.5 million federal workers whose average salary is about $475
 a month, roughly two-thirds of whom are educators.

 The key demands of the government workers' unions have been for a bonus of one
 month's pay, an increase to 90 days' pay from 40 as their regular year-end bonus
 and full-time status with benefits for about 23,000 temporary workers.

 Gurría said the payments must fall within the government's budget targets for this
 year to avoid creating complications for President-elect Vicente Fox, who takes
 office Dec. 1.

 Fox met privately Wednesday with labor leaders in an apparent effort to head off a
 surge of demands for wage hikes early in his six-year term.

 Workers' buying power was savaged during the economic crisis of the mid-'90s,
 and Fox probably will have less influence over union leaders than did his long
 string of predecessors from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had held
 the nation's presidency since 1928 until Fox and his National Action Party won
 July's presidential election.