Iraqi Unemployed
Mount Protests

U.S. Arrests Unionists

by David Bacon

U.S. soldiers clash with protesters during a demonstration by the Iraqi Union of the Unemployed in front of the U.S. headquarters in Baghad.

Iraq's vast unemployed took to the streets throughout the country in early January to protest joblessness. As many as seven million people, 70 percent of the workforce, have no jobs. Many more go hungry or are homeless.

Six protesters were killed in Amarah alone on Jan. 11. Representatives of the unemployed were also promised 8,000 new jobs. However, the Associated Press reports that 28,000 were recently laid off, and that an equal number stand to lose their jobs soon.

The mass protests followed attacks on Iraq's new labor unions in the past two months. On Dec. 6, an army convoy descended on the Baghdad office of the Iraqi Workers Federation of Trade Unions (IWFTU). Soldiers handcuffed eight members of the IWFTU's executive board, and took them into detention.

Qasim Hadi, general secretary of the Union of the Unemployed, and Adil Salih, another leader of that organization, were arrested by the occupation forces on Nov. 23.

All were released after one day of detention.

The $60 a month received by most employees is the same salary paid under Saddam Hussein. But the U.S. has cut off the substantial bonuses, profit-sharing payments and subsidies for food and housing that they formerly received. "The U.S. controls the finances and our wages," says Detrala Beshab, president of Al Daura oil refinery's new union.

NEW WAVE OF ORGANIZING

Although the U.S. has banned unions at government-owned companies like Al Daura, the IWFTU helped the refinery's workers organize a union and has done the same in other industries. In Basra workers have formed a central labor council, and have mounted protest demonstrations. The Workers Unions and Councils group has helped workers elect committees in the State Leather Industry plant, the largest shoe factory in the Middle East, and the Mamoun Vegetable Oil enterprise, among others.

The U.S.'s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has issued an order that threatens anyone who "incites civil disorder" with detention as a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention. The recent arrests of union leaders are the latest efforts by the occupation authorities to suppress wages and unions. The U.S. is trying to keep the occupation's costs down and to make the country attractive to foreign investors.

Indeed, in October Thomas Foley, the U.S. director for Iraq's private sector development, announced a list of the first Iraqi state enterprises to be sold off. It included cement and fertilizer plants, phosphate and sulfur mines, pharmaceutical factories and the country's airline. This followed the CPA's Order No. 39, which permits 100 percent foreign ownership of businesses, except for the oil industry, and allows the transfer of profits outside the country.

Iraqi workers fear the privatization of their workplaces will bring massive layoffs. The manager of the Al Daura oil refinery, Dathar Al-Kashab, predicts that with privatization, "I'll have to fire 1,500 [of the refinery's 3,000] workers. If I dismiss employees now, I'm killing them and their families."

IWFTU leader Jassim Mashkoul laments that, "at the beginning, we thought our situation might get better, since we got rid of Saddam Hussein. But it hasn't improved." Muhsen Mull Ali, who spent two long stints in prison for organizing unions, says: "Our responsibility is to oppose privatization as much as possible, and fight for the welfare of our workers."

But to the Bush administration and the occupation authority, this activity is a crime.

David Bacon, a journalist and photographer who recently traveled to Iraq, is author of the newly published The Children of NAFTA.

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