Iraqi Unions Defy Privatization
Oil for Freedom
By David Bacon
The Progressive
Sunday 02 October 2005
Basra, Iraq - The morning of April 9, 2003, started like any other at Basra's huge, dilapidated oil refinery. Workers knew the US/British invasion of their country might begin anytime. Still, no one expected American tanks when they suddenly pulled up at the gate. After thirty years of Saddam Hussein, the vast majority of the refinery's laborers had had their fill of war and repression. While there was always a small core of Baathist loyalists among them, most were prepared to welcome almost any change that removed the old regime, even foreign troops.
"We were coming out early, at the end of our shift, and there was the American army," recalls Faraj Arbat, one of the plant's firemen. "We were ready to say hello." Instead of greeting the workers as their liberators, however, the soldiers trained guns on them. The head of the fire department made the mistake of questioning the troops, and was ordered to lie face down on the ground. "Abdulritha was absolutely shocked," Arbat recalls. "He was going home - why should he lie down? But he did as he was ordered. Then an American put his foot on his back. So we started fighting with the soldiers with our fists, because we didn't understand. The tank turret started to turn toward us, and at that point we all sat down."
Someone easily could have died that day. As it was, the memory of the foot on Abdulritha's back left a bitter taste.
The Rebirth of the Oil Workers' Union
The refinery's workers were used to conflict, having labored through two decades of shelling and fires, including the "shock and awe" bombing prior to the US invasion. Some fled the arriving troops, but most stayed and tried to bring the plant back into operation. "Slowly we got production restored, by our own efforts," Arbat remembers. "Electricity workers, at their own expense, brought power back to the refinery. We found where the water pipes had been blown up, and went out with armed guards to repair them. Meanwhile, the Americans and British began coming with tanker trucks, loading up on the gas and oil we were producing."
For two months, no one got paid. Finally, Arbat and a small group began to organize a union. "At first the word frightened people, because under Saddam, unions had become instruments of oppression," he explains. Nevertheless, a few dozen of the refinery's 3000 employees came together and chose Arbat (whom they affectionately call Abu, or Uncle, Rebab) and Ibrahim Radiy to lead them.
Lead they did.
To force authorities to pay the workers, the small group took a crane out to the gate, and lowered it across the road. Behind it, two dozen tanker trucks pulled up with a heavily armed British military escort. "At first there were only 100 of us, but workers began coming out. Some took their shirts off and told the troops, 'Shoot us.' Others lay down on the ground." Ten of them even went under the tankers, brandishing cigarette lighters. They announced that if the soldiers fired, they would set the tankers alight.
The soldiers, mostly sons of workers themselves, did not fire. Instead, negotiations began between the general director and the occupation authorities in Basra. By the end of the day, the workers had their pay. Within a week, everyone at the refinery joined, and the oil union in Basra had been reborn.
Reborn is the proper word, because the union for oil workers is one of Iraq's oldest institutions. Originally organized when Iraq was a British colony in the early 1920s, the oil union has always been the heart of the country's labor movement. "Our two biggest strikes, in 1946 and 1952, were organized by oil workers," says Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the newly reorganized General Union of Oil Employees. Today it is again the country's largest, most powerful labor organization, with 23,000 members in southern Iraq. Together with two other labor federations, and a handful of independent professional associations, the labor movement is now the biggest institution in Iraqi civil society.
Unions occupy a critical, but perilous, position. They confront the occupation's economic plan directly and are its most vocal opponents. The neoliberal program for transforming the economy was announced by Paul Bremer, appointed by President Bush to head the Coalition Provisional Authority in mid-2003. Its basic elements include the privatization of state-owned industry (including transportation, ports, communications, and most manufacturing), enforcing a low standard of living and high unemployment, and ending state subsidies on food and public services.
In September 2003, Bremer issued two orders, 29 and 30, to put those principles into practice. They lowered the base industrial wage from $60 to $40/month, cut payments for food and housing, allowed private ownership by foreigners of state enterprises (except oil), and permitted the total repatriation of profits outside the country [see The Progressive, 12/03]. When power was handed over to a supposedly independent government in June 2004, the transitional law enacted at the time froze the Bremer orders into place, until a new constitution could be written and a new government elected. That has yet to happen.
Bremer appointed Bush fundraiser Tom Foley to head the occupation's privatization agency. Foley published lists throughout late 2003 of factories to be put on the auction block. When the deteriorating security situation and the dubious legality of sales by an occupation government discouraged would-be corporate buyers, those plans were temporarily shelved. But Iraq's Industry Minister revived them this spring, listing again a number of enterprises the government intends to sell off.
Privatization is not popular - nationalist sentiment views the public sector, especially oil, as a guarantee of sovereignty and a key to future economic development. Iraq's new unions are its most vocal critics. To keep their critique from gaining a political base, Bremer kept in force Law 150, issued by Saddam Hussein in 1987. Hussein, and then Bremer, decreed that Iraqi workers in the state-owned sector had no right to organize unions. As a result, Iraqi labor has had to operate in illegal conditions.
That hasn't kept unions from organizing to successfully challenge the occupation, however. In fact, the first big fight over the US and British economic program came within a few months of the confrontation at the Basra refinery gate.
Workers Drive KBR out of the South
KBR, subsidiary of the oil services giant Halliburton, was one of the corporate camp followers arriving in the wake of the troops. KBR was given a no-bid contract to put out war-caused oil fires in the huge Rumeila fields, but once its foot was in the door, its presence spread rapidly. Within weeks, it had taken over the financial functions of Basra's civil administration. Workers, in order to get paid, had to take their time sheets to local KBR offices for approval. Those who had fled the advancing troops had to get company permission to return to their jobs.
Then KBR claimed the work of reconstructing wells, pipelines and other oil facilities, and hired a Kuwaiti contractor, Al Khoorafi, to bring in a foreign workforce. Meanwhile, the company used its presence in the oil fields to try to hire drilling rig workers away from the Iraqi Drilling Company, a national enterprise. Despite promises of higher wages, few took the bait. In fact, Iraqi oil workers were outraged. With unemployment hovering at 70%, they saw a clear threat to their jobs. But according to Hassan Juma'a Awad, now president of the General Union of Oil Employees, workers had other concerns as well.
"We organized the union for two reasons," Juma'a explains. "First, we had to deal with the administration put in place by the occupying forces. Second, we're afraid that the purpose of the occupation is to take control of the oil industry. It is our duty as Iraqi workers to protect the oil installations, since they are the property of the Iraqi people. We're sure that US and international companies are here to put their hands on the oil."
By August, 2003, oil workers had organized unions in ten state-owned companies in southern Iraq, and formed the GUOE. They gave KBR an August 20 deadline to leave the oil sector. When the company refused to talk with them, they shut down oil production for export. "For 2 days we didn't move," says Farouk Sadiq, a union leader and teacher at Basra's Oil Institute. "We refused to pump a single drop until they left. We said we wanted them to leave by peaceful means - otherwise we had another language to speak with them. Other workers in Basra refused to work too, and the American authority saw we could affect what really matters to them. It was independence day for oil labor."
KBR did leave the oil districts, and closed their civil administration offices in Basra. >>>cont
Link Here
By David Bacon
The Progressive
Sunday 02 October 2005
Basra, Iraq - The morning of April 9, 2003, started like any other at Basra's huge, dilapidated oil refinery. Workers knew the US/British invasion of their country might begin anytime. Still, no one expected American tanks when they suddenly pulled up at the gate. After thirty years of Saddam Hussein, the vast majority of the refinery's laborers had had their fill of war and repression. While there was always a small core of Baathist loyalists among them, most were prepared to welcome almost any change that removed the old regime, even foreign troops.
"We were coming out early, at the end of our shift, and there was the American army," recalls Faraj Arbat, one of the plant's firemen. "We were ready to say hello." Instead of greeting the workers as their liberators, however, the soldiers trained guns on them. The head of the fire department made the mistake of questioning the troops, and was ordered to lie face down on the ground. "Abdulritha was absolutely shocked," Arbat recalls. "He was going home - why should he lie down? But he did as he was ordered. Then an American put his foot on his back. So we started fighting with the soldiers with our fists, because we didn't understand. The tank turret started to turn toward us, and at that point we all sat down."
Someone easily could have died that day. As it was, the memory of the foot on Abdulritha's back left a bitter taste.
The Rebirth of the Oil Workers' Union
The refinery's workers were used to conflict, having labored through two decades of shelling and fires, including the "shock and awe" bombing prior to the US invasion. Some fled the arriving troops, but most stayed and tried to bring the plant back into operation. "Slowly we got production restored, by our own efforts," Arbat remembers. "Electricity workers, at their own expense, brought power back to the refinery. We found where the water pipes had been blown up, and went out with armed guards to repair them. Meanwhile, the Americans and British began coming with tanker trucks, loading up on the gas and oil we were producing."
For two months, no one got paid. Finally, Arbat and a small group began to organize a union. "At first the word frightened people, because under Saddam, unions had become instruments of oppression," he explains. Nevertheless, a few dozen of the refinery's 3000 employees came together and chose Arbat (whom they affectionately call Abu, or Uncle, Rebab) and Ibrahim Radiy to lead them.
Lead they did.
To force authorities to pay the workers, the small group took a crane out to the gate, and lowered it across the road. Behind it, two dozen tanker trucks pulled up with a heavily armed British military escort. "At first there were only 100 of us, but workers began coming out. Some took their shirts off and told the troops, 'Shoot us.' Others lay down on the ground." Ten of them even went under the tankers, brandishing cigarette lighters. They announced that if the soldiers fired, they would set the tankers alight.
The soldiers, mostly sons of workers themselves, did not fire. Instead, negotiations began between the general director and the occupation authorities in Basra. By the end of the day, the workers had their pay. Within a week, everyone at the refinery joined, and the oil union in Basra had been reborn.
Reborn is the proper word, because the union for oil workers is one of Iraq's oldest institutions. Originally organized when Iraq was a British colony in the early 1920s, the oil union has always been the heart of the country's labor movement. "Our two biggest strikes, in 1946 and 1952, were organized by oil workers," says Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the newly reorganized General Union of Oil Employees. Today it is again the country's largest, most powerful labor organization, with 23,000 members in southern Iraq. Together with two other labor federations, and a handful of independent professional associations, the labor movement is now the biggest institution in Iraqi civil society.
Unions occupy a critical, but perilous, position. They confront the occupation's economic plan directly and are its most vocal opponents. The neoliberal program for transforming the economy was announced by Paul Bremer, appointed by President Bush to head the Coalition Provisional Authority in mid-2003. Its basic elements include the privatization of state-owned industry (including transportation, ports, communications, and most manufacturing), enforcing a low standard of living and high unemployment, and ending state subsidies on food and public services.
In September 2003, Bremer issued two orders, 29 and 30, to put those principles into practice. They lowered the base industrial wage from $60 to $40/month, cut payments for food and housing, allowed private ownership by foreigners of state enterprises (except oil), and permitted the total repatriation of profits outside the country [see The Progressive, 12/03]. When power was handed over to a supposedly independent government in June 2004, the transitional law enacted at the time froze the Bremer orders into place, until a new constitution could be written and a new government elected. That has yet to happen.
Bremer appointed Bush fundraiser Tom Foley to head the occupation's privatization agency. Foley published lists throughout late 2003 of factories to be put on the auction block. When the deteriorating security situation and the dubious legality of sales by an occupation government discouraged would-be corporate buyers, those plans were temporarily shelved. But Iraq's Industry Minister revived them this spring, listing again a number of enterprises the government intends to sell off.
Privatization is not popular - nationalist sentiment views the public sector, especially oil, as a guarantee of sovereignty and a key to future economic development. Iraq's new unions are its most vocal critics. To keep their critique from gaining a political base, Bremer kept in force Law 150, issued by Saddam Hussein in 1987. Hussein, and then Bremer, decreed that Iraqi workers in the state-owned sector had no right to organize unions. As a result, Iraqi labor has had to operate in illegal conditions.
That hasn't kept unions from organizing to successfully challenge the occupation, however. In fact, the first big fight over the US and British economic program came within a few months of the confrontation at the Basra refinery gate.
Workers Drive KBR out of the South
KBR, subsidiary of the oil services giant Halliburton, was one of the corporate camp followers arriving in the wake of the troops. KBR was given a no-bid contract to put out war-caused oil fires in the huge Rumeila fields, but once its foot was in the door, its presence spread rapidly. Within weeks, it had taken over the financial functions of Basra's civil administration. Workers, in order to get paid, had to take their time sheets to local KBR offices for approval. Those who had fled the advancing troops had to get company permission to return to their jobs.
Then KBR claimed the work of reconstructing wells, pipelines and other oil facilities, and hired a Kuwaiti contractor, Al Khoorafi, to bring in a foreign workforce. Meanwhile, the company used its presence in the oil fields to try to hire drilling rig workers away from the Iraqi Drilling Company, a national enterprise. Despite promises of higher wages, few took the bait. In fact, Iraqi oil workers were outraged. With unemployment hovering at 70%, they saw a clear threat to their jobs. But according to Hassan Juma'a Awad, now president of the General Union of Oil Employees, workers had other concerns as well.
"We organized the union for two reasons," Juma'a explains. "First, we had to deal with the administration put in place by the occupying forces. Second, we're afraid that the purpose of the occupation is to take control of the oil industry. It is our duty as Iraqi workers to protect the oil installations, since they are the property of the Iraqi people. We're sure that US and international companies are here to put their hands on the oil."
By August, 2003, oil workers had organized unions in ten state-owned companies in southern Iraq, and formed the GUOE. They gave KBR an August 20 deadline to leave the oil sector. When the company refused to talk with them, they shut down oil production for export. "For 2 days we didn't move," says Farouk Sadiq, a union leader and teacher at Basra's Oil Institute. "We refused to pump a single drop until they left. We said we wanted them to leave by peaceful means - otherwise we had another language to speak with them. Other workers in Basra refused to work too, and the American authority saw we could affect what really matters to them. It was independence day for oil labor."
KBR did leave the oil districts, and closed their civil administration offices in Basra. >>>cont
Link Here
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