[Peace-discuss] labor, peace, justice in Iraq

[Ricky Baldwin]

[This story, from the Open World Conference of
Workers, dramatically illustrates how the US is
'liberating' Iraq.  That is, we are not liberating
Iraqis to live in a free and open society, but rather
we are liberating Iraqi resources and labor power for
use by international neoliberal projects, often
falsely called "free trade" policies. - RB]

IN IRAQ, LABOR PROTEST IS A CRIME 
By DAVID BACON 

Iraq's legal code may be in disarray. The streets of
Baghdad may be filled with thieves and hijackers who
seem to have little fear of being arrested. But US
occupation authorities seem to have no trouble
identifying one crime, at least. For the four million
people out of work in Iraq, protest is against the
law. 

On July 29, US occupation forces in Iraq arrested a
leader of Iraq's new emerging labor movement, Kacem
Madi, along with 20 other members of the Union of the
Unemployed. The unionists had been conducting a sit-in
to protest the treatment of unemployed Iraqi workers
by the US occupation authority, and the fact that
contracts for work rebuilding the country have been
given overwhelmingly to US corporations. 

Their protest started when hundreds of unemployed
workers gathered in front of an old bank building on
Abu Nawas Street.. From there they marched to the
office of the ruling occupation council. According to
Zehira Houfani, a member of the Iraq Solidarity
Project in Canada, who witnessed the protest, workers
in similar demonstrations in the past had normally
dispersed at that point. Each time, however, Madi told
Houfani, "the representatives of the occupation forces
meet and discuss with us, promise to solve the
problem, but each time their promises are not
fulfilled and we are forced to take to the streets
again." 

On this occasion they decided to step up the pressure
on US authorities. In the time-honored tradition of
workers from Mexico to the Philippines, they set up a
planton, or a tent encampment, outside the council
gates. US soldiers on guard ordered them to disperse,
but the workers refused. Night fell. Then, at one in
the morning the soldiers returned, arrested 21
protesters, and took them inside the compound, where
they were held until the following morning. One
arrested union member, 58-year old Ali Djaafri, told
Houfani that the experience was "very humiliating. At
no other time during the occupation," he said, "has my
resentment towards the US soldiers been that strong." 

The unemployment rate is over 50% in cities like
Baghdad. Madi estimates that four million Iraqi
workers have no jobs. Thousands of public-sector
workers employed by the former government lost their
jobs after the war. Many provided services from
healthcare to education, and those services have yet
to be restored. There is no money to pay those
workers, nor an Iraqi government to employ them. Even
the records of their employment went up in flames in
the looting which followed the occupation of Baghdad. 

Thousands more worked in former government-owned
enterprises. Many of those have been closed down, and
occupation authorities have announced their intention
to privatize huge sections of the former economy. 

That all adds up to thousands of working families
facing an extreme economic crisis. The new union for
unemployed workers has become the fastest-growing,
largest labor organization in the country as a result.


At the same time, the issue of the foreign contracts
has become a hot controversy among Iraqi workers
because the US corporations bring workers into the
country to work under those contracts. A Kuwaiti firm
subcontracting to the US construction giant Kellogg,
Brown and Root, for instance, was recently found to be
bringing Asian workers into the port of Basra to
perform repair and reconstruction work. Meanwhile,
Iraqi workers with long years of experience sit idle. 

Kacem Madi and other unemployed leaders led the sit-in
protest over this discrimination, and announced that
they would continue their demonstrations until they
either received jobs or some kind of unemployment
payment. But occupation authorities, instead of trying
to address the problem, arrested them. 

International labor organizations, including the
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (of
which the AFL-CIO is a member) have sharply criticized
the desperate situation of Iraqi workers. "Ensuring
respect for workers' rights, including freedom of
association, must be central to building a democratic
Iraq and to ensuring sustainable economic and social
development," the ICFTU said in a statement made May
30. "Democracy must have roots. It requires free
elections, but also mass based, democratic trade
unions that help secure it and protect it as well as
being schools of democracy." Arab trade unionists are
even more critical of the occupation's effect on
workers. 

According to Hacene Djemam, General Secretary of the
International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions, "war
makes privatization easy: first you destroy the
society and then you let the corporations rebuild it."
He emphasized that Iraqi workers must be able to form
unions of their own choosing. 

Unfortunately, the corporations who have been granted
contracts for work in Iraq by the Bush administration
have long records of fighting unions and violating
labor rights. In May, Amy Newell, national coordinator
of US Labor Against the War, and former executive
secretary of the Monterey/Santa Cruz Central Labor
Council, went to Geneva to present a report to
international labor bodies, highlighting the record of
18 of those corporations. 

USLAW is a network of unions and other labor
organizations opposed to U.S. policy in Iraq. The
organization charges that the U.S. government pays for
a bloated military budget with severe cuts in domestic
social programs. It grew out of the many
demonstrations prior to the March 20 invasion, by
which time unions representing almost one-third of all
organized workers in the U.S. were on record against
the war. At that time even the AFL-CIO itself publicly
opposed the Bush administration's Iraq policy. 

Companies highlighted in the report made in Geneva
include: - Stevedoring Services of America. SSA was a
leader in last year's efforts by Pacific Coast
shippers to lock out west coast longshore workers, and
worked with the Bush administration to threaten the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union with
breaking up its coastwise agreement and bringing
troops onto the docks. ILWU spokesperson Steve
Stallone called SSA "ideologically anti-union and
anti-ILWU." 

- MCI Worldcom. Worldcom has a long record of opposing
worker efforts to organize. It declared bankruptcy in
2002 after fraudulently claiming $11 billion in
earnings. As a result, the retirement savings of
thousands of workers were completely wiped out, along
with $2.6 billion in public pension funds. The Iraq
contract was awarded after the company was fined $500
million by the Securities and Exchange Commission for
its illegal fraud. 

- Eight of the eighteen companies with the major
contracts are completely non-union. Almost all have
records of fighting any union organizing effort. 

The USLAW report also discusses the track record of
social responsibility of the corporations involved. It
found a long history of corporate corruption and
bribery (Halliburton Corp., which still pays $1
million a year to former director Vice President Dick
Cheney), organizing mercenary armies (Dyncorp/Computer
Sciences Corp.), and years of cooperation with
repressive governments, from Hussein's regime itself
(Halliburton again, and San Francisco's Bechtel Corp.)
to the former apartheid regime in South Africa (Fluor
Corp.) 

"Prior to its suppression by the Hussein regime, Iraq
enjoyed a robust and broadly representative labor
movement," the report concludes. [The pre-Hussein
government was overthrown in a 1956 cold-war coup
organized by the Central Intelligence Agency - ed]
"Its legacy provides the seedbed for reestablishing an
independent labor movement with internationally
recognized workers' rights to organize, bargain and
strike. However, the occupying powers have invited
into Iraq private corporations with an established
record of labor, environmental and human rights
violations. These corporations were chosen by the Bush
administration, which itself is considered by many as
the most anti-worker, union-hostile administration in
modern U.S. history. This does not bode well for
respect of workers rights in Iraq." 

If the arrest of Madi and the unemployed workers last
month in Baghdad is any indication, that concern is
well deserved. 

---- 

(David Bacon is a free-lance journalist and renowned
labor activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.) 



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