UNIONBUSTING, IRAQI STYLE By David Bacon The Nation, 10/7/10 http://www.thenation.com/article/155230/unionbusting-iraqi-style http://www.agenceglobal.com/article.asp?id=2429
The political deadlock in Baghdad, which has prevented the formation of an Iraqi government more than six months after the parliamentary elections of last March, has not prevented the lame-duck administration of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki from opening its southern oilfields to the world's giant corporations. Nor has it stopped the US Embassy and Commerce Department from reinvigorating the Bush-era program of selling the country's public assets to corporate buyers. And because Iraqi unions have organized public opposition to privatization since the start of the occupation, the Maliki administration is enforcing with a vengeance Saddam Hussein's prohibition on public-sector unions. The United States may have withdrawn its combat brigades, but it is not leaving Iraq. And while Washington may have scaled back earlier dreams of "nation building," it has not given up on a key aspect of the economic agenda behind that project: sacrificing the rights of Iraqi workers and unions to encourage corporate investment. Unions have been locked in conflict with the Iraqi government since the occupation began, but in the last year, that conflict has grown much more intense. In March, after oil workers protested low pay and their union's illegal status, worksite leaders were transferred hundreds of miles from home. The oil ministry banned travel outside Iraq for Hassan Juma'a and Falih Abood, respectively president and general secretary of the Federation of Oil Employees of Iraq. Both were hauled into court and threatened with arrest. "It is our duty as Iraqi workers to protect the oil installations, since they are the property of the Iraqi people," Juma'a explained in early 2005, when the U.S. was still directly governing Iraq. "We are sure that the US and the international companies came here to put their hands on the country's oil reserves." Juma'a's union chased Halliburton's subsidiary KBR from southern Iraq in the first year of the occupation. Then, as the Bush administration pushed for passage of a Hydrocarbon Law to facilitate foreign investment, the union organized widespread opposition, and mounted what was, in effect, a political strike. On June 4, 2007, the Federation of Oil Employees shut down the pipelines from the Rumeila fields near Basra, to the Baghdad refinery and the rest of the country. It called for keeping oil in public hands, and protested poor housing and high unemployment. Maliki called out the army and surrounded the strikers near Basra. Then he issued arrest warrants for the union's leaders. U.S. aircraft buzzed and overflew Basra during and after the strike, increasing pressure on the union. Finally Maliki agreed to the union's principal demand -- holding implementation of the oil law in abeyance. Iraq's unions were already the largest non-sectarian organizations in the country. After the confrontation, they also became the leading voices advocating both for economic improvement and continued national ownership of oil, electricity and industry. While the oil union doesn't oppose all foreign investment, it has criticized the government for signing unfavorable contracts with oil corporations. The union especially opposes "production-sharing" agreements, in which foreign companies get a share of the oil they produce, rather than simply receiving a fee for their services. Production sharing agreements are rare, even in conservative Arab countries, because they hand a great deal of control to oil corporations over both production and marketing. Oil ministry spokesman Assam Jihad told the Iraq Oil Report that "unionists instigate the public against the plans of the Oil Ministry to develop [Iraq's] oil riches using foreign development." The Iraq Oil Report, started by former UPI reporter Ben Lando, uses its wide network of correspondents to track, not only conditions in the industry, but the social movements of workers and residents of the oil districts. The oil union is far from the only labor organization targetted by the Iraqi government for repression. This past July 21, Electricity and Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani expelled the Iraqi Electrical Utility Workers Union in Basra from its offices. Despite billions spent on contracts to rebuild power plants (GE alone got $3 billion), Basra residents only got power a few hours a day during 120-degree heat this summer. June demonstrations over blackouts, supported by the union-the first national union led by a woman, Hashmeya Muhsin-were put down by police, who killed Haider Dawood Selman and injured several others. Shahristani then issued an order to shut the union down. A thousand Basra workers protested, shouting slogans asking Shahristani where the $13 billion appropriated for electricity reconstruction had disappeared. Within days, the union was expelled from its offices. Meanwhile, longshoremen protesting the prohibition on unions in ports south of Basra were surrounded by troops, and that unions leaders were also transferred hundreds of miles from their homes. This union too has a history of opposing privatization, and in 2005 forced shipping giants Maersk and Stevedoring Services of America to give up sweeheart concessions in Iraqi ports granted them by occupation authorities. In January the government threw the president of Basra's teachers' union in jail. According to Nasser al Hussain, an executive board member of the Iraqi Teachers Union, the government seeks to establish control over an organization whose members wield wide influence in Iraqi society, but which is views as much too independent. Conditions for teachers have been among the worst and most dangerous. Students in many schools have no books or supplies, other than what teachers provide, and 210 educators were murdered in one year alone, 2006. In recent union elections, Maliki's party tried to run a slate of officers who would be more politically reliable. At government insistence, an election was held in which some ballot boxes were even located in his party's offices. 'Key forces within the government are using a law inherited from Saddam's era to try to control and split trade unions," Nasser says. These latest actions continue an active Iraqi and US policy to prevent unions from opposing abysmal living standards, high unemployment and neoliberal market reforms. Although unions began to reorganize as soon as the Saddam Hussein regime fell, they quickly found that Washington's vision of democracy didn't include their rights. After the 2003 invasion, occupation czar Paul Bremer decided to keep on the books Saddam's Law 150, which bans public-sector unions. Each succeeding Iraqi administration has continued the prohibition. Despite the ban, however, unions grew so quickly, and enjoyed such widespread public support, that they often were able to force the ministries in industries like oil, ports and power generation to tolerate their existence, and even concede benefits. To make it as difficult as possible for them to function, in 2006 the government prohibited public-sector unions from collecting dues or opening bank accounts. And this August the parliamentary committee that was considering a new labor law, which would have given unions legal status and the right to bargain, discarded the project. Meanwhile, oil corporations are racing into Basra's fields. The Maliki government has given contracts for developing existing fields and exploring new ones to eighteen companies, including ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, the Italian Eni, Russia's Gazprom and Lukoil, Malaysia's Petronas and a partnership between BP and the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation. U.S. corporations won only two of eighteeen contracts, yet at the same time, it is U.S. military protection that provides the security umbrella protecting all of their field operations. While suspicion of the Chinese and Russians may be endemic in Washington, U.S. policy in Basra welcomes any oil giant. "That means CNPC and Lukoil," says Kenneth Thomas, who heads the U.S. Embassy's Provincial Reconstruction Team. "I don't have a prohibition." The United States uses its Contingency Operating Base in Basra to provide protection and services to oil-corporation personnel. Gen. Ray Odierno, who just retired as head of US forces in Iraq, told reporters in July the United States would continue to provide security there and in the oilfields, using troops and private contractors. Over the summer former US Ambassador Christopher Hill invited corporate executives and diplomats to the base. According to the Iraq Oil Report, he offered to facilitate visas for foreign workers and to help them open secure bank accounts, which would ease the transfer of billions of dollars in deposits. In September the Commerce Department organized a trade mission for US companies, including GE, Boeing, American Cargo Transport and twelve other engineering and transport firms. The Iraqi government is offering them $80 billion in contracts for projects, including ports and power plants. At the same time, it prohibits unions in those industries. When questioned by reporters about the union bans, an official at the US Embassy, the world's largest, said mildly, "We're looking into it. We hope that everybody resolves their differences in an amicable way." The Obama White House has not spoken out, but the last State Department report on human rights played down the crisis for Iraqi union by calling their situation a "limited exercise of labor rights." Oil union president Juma'a says, "The government doesn't want workers to have rights, because it wants people to be weak and at the mercy of employers." Hashmeya Muhsin, president of the Iraqi Electrical Utility Workers Union, believes that blackouts and repression are designed to create an atmosphere of desperation. "If people are desperate enough, the government believes they'll accept anything to get electricity, including privatization," she charges. "It knows we won't accept that, so it wants to paralyze us so we can't speak out." She says the government is starting to buy power from private generators. Under Saddam Hussein power was free, and there were no blackouts. Today, however, small generators are ubiquitous because of constant blackouts and power shortages. And larger generators are now selling pwer on a thriving black market at high prices - as much as 10-15 times the government's power price. The U.S. firm Parsons Brinckerhof estimates that the private sector now produces the equivalent of a nuclear power plant - 800 megawatts - a quarter of Baghdad's demand. Baghdad neighborhoods are laced with informal wiring, posing danger to residents. Ultimately, the growth of this sector converges with U.S. and Iraqi policies that see a private power industry as the solution, one which the electrical union has opposed strongly. "We are in danger," Muhsin warns. In response, U.S. Labor Against the War has worked with Congress members Sam Farr, Phil Hare and Jan Schakowsky to circulate a "Dear Colleague" letter urging the Obama administration to protect the unionists. U.S. labor leaders, like AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, have urged the Iraqi government to change course, and have lobbied the U.S. administration to do more. Prohibitions or not, though, Iraqi unions say they will not be driven underground again, as they were under Saddam for decades. For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002 See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575 See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html -- __________________________________ David Bacon, Photographs and Stories http://dbacon.igc.org __________________________________ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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