(Adds government comment in paragraph 13-14)

By Cris Chinaka

HARARE, April 3 (Reuters) - Fear crippled a national strike called by Zimbabwe unions on Tuesday as workers, companies and shops heeded government warnings and carried on with business in an economy verging on collapse.

President Robert Mugabe's government says the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) called the strike as part of a plot by the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to oust it and promised tough action against any open protests.

The ZCTU said the two-day stay-away action was spurred by Zimbabwe's economic crisis, which has seen inflation soar to more than 1,700 percent and left most workers struggling to pay their bills and feed their families.

The government sent a helicopter patrol winging over the city while riot police patrolled central Harare, but there were few visible signs of increased police presence in industrial districts and restive townships.

Journalists who drove around Harare's industrial areas early on Tuesday found many firms operating as usual, and the normal hordes of job seekers waiting outside factory gates seeking employment in an economy in freefall.

Banks, offices and shops were also open in the capital's central business district and a journalist in Zimbabwe's second largest city of Bulawayo said many businesses there appeared to operating normally.

"Zimbabweans are very risk averse and in this case they are unsure of the benefits of the stayaway but very sure of the possibility of the wrath of the state," Eldred Masunungure, a leading political commentator said.

"QUITE SUCCESSFUL"

The ZCTU say workers want a minimum wage of 1 million Zimbabwe dollars ($4,000 on the official market but worth $50 on the black market) and for the government to resolve an economic meltdown and increase access to AIDS drugs.

The ZCTU accused authorities of intimidation but said the job boycott was successful.

"Considering the bashing of people and intimidation we have witnessed recently, it (strike) has been quite successful," ZCTU president Lovemore Matombo told Reuters.

"It has been more effective in industries were some workers have stayed at home," he added.

Matombo said earlier he hoped workers would risk open defiance to protest an economic crisis that has seen the country battle the world's highest inflation rate, unemployment of more than 80 percent and frequent shortages of food and fuel.

Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu said the job boycott had failed, adding that the government was working on several measures, including importing food, to ease the economic crisis.

"It was a dismal failure, the organisers and their British and American backers were predicting chaos. This has not happened," Ndlovu told journalists.

An executive at a Harare clothing factory said almost all his 50 employees had turned up for work.

"I understand what the ZCTU is trying to do for us," said one of those employees, Dickson Mapara.

"But things are so hard I cannot afford to lose this job, and although I get very little, I cannot afford to get nothing at all," he said as some of his colleagues shouted at a Reuters reporter to get off the premises.

The job action comes as Mugabe faces international condemnation over a crackdown last month which left main MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai injured and hospitalised after police stopped a banned prayer rally.

In neighbouring South Africa, about 400 people marched through central Johannesburg in a solidarity protest called by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, which has been one of the region's harshest critics of Mugabe's rule.

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