Iraqi Labor’s Resistance

The FWCUI is affiliated with the Workers’ Communist Party of Iraq, which has taken a much more distant attitude toward the occupation authorities. Alwan says UN forces should replace U.S. troops. “We call for a congress of liberation, including all the powers in Iraq, to end the occupation and rebuild civil society,” he explains. The General Union of Oil Employees wants the troops to leave right away. After surveying its members, “Almost everyone [told us] they want the occupation to end immediately and the immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces from Iraq,” says Juma’a. In August he emphasized that the GUOE “demands the immediate departure of the occupation forces from the country, because we are capable of administering the state as Iraqis, whatever the consequences.... The current divisions are caused by the occupation.” 

Following a June tour of the United States organized by U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW), the three unions agreed on a statement. It was the first time Iraq’s major unions have developed a common position on the two key issues that confront them—the occupation and privatization. “The occupation must end in all its forms, including military bases and economic domination,” the statement said. “The war was fought for oil and regional domination, in violation of international law, justified by lies and deception, without consultation with the Iraqi people. The occupation has been a catastrophe for both our peoples.” 

There are many reasons why workers and unions hate the occupation. Iraqi unemployment, according to the economics faculty of Baghdad University, has been at 70 percent since the occupation started. Among U.S. occupation czar Paul Bremer’s free market oriented orders was number 30, issued in September 2003 and still in force. It lowered the base wage in public enterprises (where most permanently-employed Iraqis work) to $35 a month and ended subsidies for food and housing. Most of all, workers hate Law 150, issued by Saddam Hussein in 1987, which prohibited unions and collective bargaining in the public sector. Bremer chose to continue enforcing this measure and bound the transitional governments that followed him to do the same. Bremer then backed up the edict by issuing Public Order 1, banning even advocacy leading to civil disorder. He arrested IFTU leaders, expelling them from their Baghdad offices. He also put down some of the first street protests in Baghdad, organized by the Union of Unemployed of Iraq (part of the FWCUI), and has arrested the union’s head, Qasim Hadi, many times. 

Iraqi unions see these moves as a way to soften up workers to ensure they don’t resist the privatization of the country’s economy. Privatization defies the tradition of social solidarity in Iraq, which favors using oil revenues to industrialize the country, creating a public sector that can put people to work and ensure a self-sustaining national economy. Hassan Juma’a says workers at the Southern Oil Company began organizing their union as the troops were entering Basra because of “our fear that the purpose of the occupation was the oil, that they’ve come to take control of the oil industry. Without organizing ourselves, we would be unable to protect our industry.” In May the GUOE organized a conference in Basra opposing privatization of the oil industry. The union seeks to initiate a political front in the south to stop the occupation from placing transnational corporations in control of oil resources. 

The IFTU also opposes privatization. “Iraqi publicly-owned enterprises should stay publicly owned,” says Ghasib Hassan. “We will never accept the privatization of oil. It is the only source of wealth we can use to rebuild our country.” Alwan and the FCWUI have organized worker committees in a number of Baghdad factories and opposition to privatization has been a major motivation there also. 

Despite facing a hostile occupation with a vested interest in their suppression and an armed insurgency targeting unions and civil society, Iraq’s labor movement has made remarkable progress in organizing workers and challenging free-market policies. This past February, Baghdad’s hotel workers belonging to the federation struck first the Sheraton and then the Palestine Hotel next door. Both are luxurious establishments behind high walls, housing U.S. journalists and administrators. The IFTU managed to force de facto recognition and bargaining in some workplaces and now claims 12 national unions and 200,000 members. Metalworkers at Baghdad’s Al Nassr molding and car parts factory won a minimum wage of 150,000 Iraqi dinars (about $100) per month. The Rail Workers Union forced a wage increase at Railways of the Iraqi Republic from 75,000 to 125,000 Iraqi dinars per month and equal pay for men and women.

Basra is the scene of Iraqi workers’ biggest victory so far. At the Southern Oil Company, the union first took on KBR, a division of Halliburton, which was given a no-bid reconstruction contract to repair oil facilities. In the first months of the occupation, KBR tried to bring in a Kuwaiti contractor, Al Khoraafi, along with workers from outside the country. The newly-reformed oil workers union struck for three days in August 2003 and forced KBR to renounce its plans to take over reconstruction work and replace Iraqi workers. Then the union directly challenged the Bremer wage order. “We managed to get the minimum salary up to 150,000 Iraqi dinars, or about $100,” Hassan Juma’a recalls. 

Similar fights broke out in the electrical stations around Basra. Juma’a and the Basra head of the IFTU, Abu Lina, went to the deepwater port of Um Qasr to help dockworkers get organized and push for better wages. In April the port workers union, supported by the oil workers and others, blockaded the port of Zubair and forced out the Danish shipping giant Maersk, which had taken over the terminals at the start of the occupation. In mid-2004 the U.S. multinational Stevedoring Services of America was also forced out of the port of Um Qasr. 

While the oil workers and the two Iraqi labor federations are organizationally independent from each other, in the past they have cooperated on the ground in Basra and the south. According to Juma’a, “We’re still looking to see which unions, at the end of the day, are the legitimate ones representing the interests of the workers.” 

That cooperation, however, is becoming much more strained. The IFTU, which has been accused in the past of trying to claim status as Iraq’s sole officially-recognized labor federation, entered into a controversial pact with its former Ba’athist adversaries in September. The IFTU’s new partners are the General Workers’ Federation of Iraq and the General Workers’ Federation of the Republic of Iraq, both remnants of the state-sponsored General Federation of Trade Unions under Saddam Hussein. This agreement, brokered by the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions, gave the new General Federation of Iraqi Workers the right to represent the country’s labor movement internationally (specifically, at the ICATU) “until circumstances allow the holding of general union elections.” 

The agreement calls for rejection of the occupation as its first point. It is possible, some observers believe, that the IFTU is preparing for the end of the occupation and seeks to break a “nationalist” element away from the insurgency. Some also speculate that the agreement is evidence of a decline in the influence of the Iraqi Communist Party (historically subjected to bloody repression by the Ba’athists) in the union federation. 

In a second controversial move, the IFTU in August made a scathing condemnation of Juma’a and the leadership of the General Union of Oil Employees, saying, “It doesn’t represent the union work of the petrol sector.” The oil workers shut down oil exports for a day to demand that a greater share of the oil revenue be spent on rebuilding the south. The rift reflects the sharp debate over the country’s newly-approved draft constitution and structure. The IFTU’s political allies accuse the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq of supporting secession under the guise of a federalist structure in which Iraq’s central government would have little power. They accuse the oil workers of entering an alliance with the governor of Basra towards that end.

As a result of almost three years of union activity, a high percentage of factories in Iraq have workerbased organizing committees and fledgling unions. To consolidate this progress, however, Iraqi unions need political unity; without it, it will be difficult to confront the occupation and defeat its privatization program, which is supported, not just by the U.S. and Britain, but by the many returned exiles who now control Iraqi ministries.

Taking advantage of this situation, in August the interim Iraqi government issued Decree 875, revoking the limited rights unions won under the Transitional Law of June 2004. That law supposedly granted workers the right to organize without state interference. The new decree, says the government will “take control of all monies belonging to the trade unions and prevent them from dispensing any such monies.” According to the FWCUI, the decree signals “a continuation of the intervention of the authorities in the unions’ business.” 

Making the occupation’s stance towards unions even clearer, a U.S. military helicopter fired on the headquarters of the IFTU-affiliated Transport and Communications Workers Union in Baghdad’s Al-Hilla district on August 15. Twenty-six workers and unionists were wounded and taken to the hospital. Despite their advances, Iraq’s unions face greater dangers than at any time since the fall of Saddam Hussein.