of the vote, the Centre 20%, the DDP 19%), the MSPD "never acted in a forcible manner" toward their bourgeois colleagues in the coalition government. The most difficult domestic challenge for the cabinet were the strikes in the first months of 1919, which were primarily concerned with raising real wages that had fallen as a result of inflation. In the Ruhr region in particular, the strikes were combined with demands for the nationalization of mines. Since coal mining was a key factor in the economy as a whole, Scheidemann's government responded in part by deploying Freikorps units but also by negotiating. In response to a general strike in central Germany in February 1919 involving three-quarters of all workers, Scheidemann had the Reichswehr (German army) occupy the city of Halle, but at the same time he announced steps to democratize the economy. The unrest that Scheidemann's government faced in Berlin was quite different. There the movement, which in the end came to be communist-led, was not concerned with economic goals but political ones. They included recognition of the workers' and soldiers' councils, implementation of the resolutions of the Reich Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils () on military policy, and resumption of political and economic relations with the Soviet Union. The government used military force against the movement in the Berlin March battles. Mass strikes also occurred in Upper Silesia, Württemberg, and Magdeburg. Scheidemann's government adopted a law in the National Assembly on 6 March 1919 that, in the words of one historian, "greatly modified and liberalized the code of military justice", bringing it into the realm of social policy. In February 1919, as a concession to the mass movement in the Ruhr, labor minister Gustav Bauer decreed setting up workers' councils for the mining industry, thus beginning a political struggle for representation of workers' councils on boards of directors. On 18 March 1919 a regulation issued by the Demobilization Office introduced the eight-hour working day for office employees, while a government declaration from the same month accepted workers' committees "as official representatives of the economy". In foreign policy, the decision on whether to accept or reject the Treaty of Versailles fell during Scheidemann's term of office. He had spoken out clearly against signing it. When the Weimar National Assembly met in Berlin for the first time on 12 May 1919, he said, "What hand should not wither that puts this