Beyond the sectarian fights in Iraq and the bloody attacks by ISIS (or now IS) on the Shiite tribes and clans there is another battle being waged in Iraq; a battle to finally put aside the draconian legislation of Saddam's Baathists of 1987 which banned union organisation in Iraq's public sector and which had effectively disenfranchised over three-quarters of Iraqi workers. These harsh laws did not pass into oblivion with the fall of Saddam and his government. These were resurrected in March 2003 by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). As soon as the CPA took power it began enforcing the harsh 1987 law. In addition, CPA head Paul Bremer issued an appendix to this law (Public Order #1) which banned pronouncements that 'incite civil disorder, rioting, or damage to property.' The phrase civil disorder was immediately applied to the Iraqi union activists and the unionists were routinely jailed and punished for their efforts to organise and to have the law changed to allow free collective bargaining. The CPA and the new Iraqi government continued to deal with their tame union leadership which had been reconstructed after the fall of Saddam and rejected any efforts by the union leadership which had been elected by the Iraqi labour movements.
This denial of the basic labour rights enshrined in the rules of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to which most governments of the world are affiliated provoked a series of responses from international trade union movements and national union centres demanding that this infamous 1987 law be changed. The U.S. AFL-CIO, the British TUC, and most of the other national centres demanded that the law be changed to allow for labour to be represented and listened to in the reconstruction of Iraq. This was not possible under the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and was then met by a profound opposition to reform by the new Iraqi government of Maliki. Its Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs objected to the reform legislation being considered by the Iraqi Parliament which was trying to modernise Iraq's labour legislation and rounded up unionists and put them in prison.
In July 2013 the various union organisations met in Baghdad, put aside their differences and agreed on a proposition which they sent to the Ministry which had continued to refuse to meet with the legitimate unionists. They cited numerous violations of the freedoms of organization of unions and rejected the view that the Ministry could not deal with any unionists who were not part of the 'official' unions. They pointed out that this was a flagrant violation of freedom of association and protection of the right to organize.
Despite the hostility of the Maliki government towards any reform of Iraq's labour legislation a bill to make these changes was introduced and was being considered by the parliament when the election was held just as the breakdown of the Iraqi political system was precipitated by the impact of the ISIS invasion. Now it hangs in limbo as there is no effective Iraqi government.
The Background to Iraqi Unionism:
Trade unionism in Iraq is not a new phenomenon. Unlike the situation in many Middle Eastern nations, Iraq had a number of national unions and a central national centre since the mid-1950s. The earliest evidence of a labour movement can be traced to a 1927 strike by railway workers. Despite a shaky start, the Iraqi trade unions played an important role in the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958; largely under the auspices of the strong Iraqi Communist Party. In 1959, one million people joined the May Day march in Baghdad. The population of Iraq was then 14 million. This illustrates the urban strength of the Iraqi communists and the level of support it received from Moscow.
In 1963 the Ba'ath took over and began to crush all opposition. In 1987, Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athists passed legislation that outlawed independent unions, banned most strikes and banned unions from state-owned enterprises. Much of the current Iraqi labour legislation derives from this 1987 act. Saddam demonised independent trade unions and hundreds of union leaders were imprisoned, tortured and executed. The regime modelled itself on the Nazis and imitated Hitler by establishing state-run Labour Fronts, which were part of the Ba'ath Party. This also applied to organisations of youth, students and women. Membership of these bogus unions became compulsory and its leaders were obliged to be Ba'athist members and to follow its instructions.
The rump of the Communist unions, however, organised themselves as an underground movement from 1977 and received financial assistance from the World Federation of Trades Unions (WFTU), based in Prague and controlled by the Russians and from the International Confederation of Arab Trades Unions (ICATU) funded by Libya, Syria and, ultimately, Russia. These dissident unionists formed the Workers' Democratic Trade Union Movement (WDTUM) in Iraq and tried to organise clandestinely. It established fraternal links with trade union centres including the British TUC.
The Ba'athists created their own General Union Federations (GUF) that functioned as 'transmission belts' of the Ba'ath Party; a form of 'yellow union' attached to the Ba'ath Party under the leadership of Jamil Salmani Ahmad al-Jabouri and controlled for the Government by Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali," a cousin of Saddam Hussein and the man thought to have ordered the 1988 chemical attack on Kurds. These organisations have continued although they have been constantly opposed by the various forces of the Iraqi opposition. Prime among the groups in opposition has been the Kurds of the North and their labour organisations within and without the Kurdish Worker's Party, PKK.
The Iraqi revolution of 1958 took place in several stages. The first revolution was triggered on Bastille Day-July 14-1958 when the overthrow of the British-installed monarchy by Iraqi Free Officers touched off the most powerful demonstration of revolutionary ardour in the Near East. Armed and highly organized, the Iraqi underground labour unions, led by the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), stood on the brink of seizing power. Within the ICP the leading role in the revolution was played by Kurdish workers in the oil fields and industries of Kirkuk and Mosul.
Within weeks, a peasant insurrection was sweeping across the agricultural plains of Iraq as peasants burned landlords' estates, destroyed the account ledgers and seized the land. The ICP controlled the labour unions, peasant organizations, and the union of students. Mammoth rallies, some drawing over a million participants, were staged in Baghdad under ICP leadership. President Eisenhower responded to the revolutionary explosion by sending Marines to Lebanon and preparing for a possible invasion of Iraq. The Wall Street Journal (16 July 1958) candidly declare'd: 'We are fighting for the oil fields of the Middle East.'
The 1958 revolution had an enormous impact throughout the Near East, not only on workers but also on the Kurdish people. One measure of the revolutionary turmoil in Iraq is that the new constitution cited the Kurds as equal partners with Arabs in society (without of course recognizing the Kurds' right to independence). The Iraqi Communist Party was not only the most proletarian of the Communist parties in the Near East; from its inception it had a large number of members from national and ethnic minorities, including Jews. In the period from 1949 to 1955, every general secretary of the ICP was Kurdish, as was nearly one-third of its central committee.
From the outset of the 1958 upsurge, the ICP (under tight Moscow guidance) threw its support behind the government headed by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qassim, whom the Stalinists hailed as their 'sole leader.' The high point of the revolution came in early 1959 when the ICP mobilized a quarter of a million people in Mosul, many of them armed, to suppress a coup by Nasserites and counterrevolutionary officers. This triggered several days of street fighting in which Communist-led workers and soldiers mopped up the conspirators and their bourgeois backers, arresting many and hanging others from lampposts. Armed militants of the People's Resistance Force (PRF), a popular militia that had been set up by Qassim in July 1958 and quickly taken over by the Communists, essentially took power in the city.
At this point, the ICP had more support among military officers than the Free Officers movement had had when it took power on 14 July 1958. The commander of the air force was an ICP supporter, as were almost one-quarter of the pilots. A number of these military commanders demanded that the ICP leadership take power. Above all, the People's Resistance Force, which had just demonstrated its power in Mosul, numbered, by a conservative estimate, 25,000 in May 1959.
However, the threat of Communist power frightened Qassim. In July, attention was centered on Kirkuk, where an ICP-led demonstration degenerated into a massacre of Turkmens, who were prominent in the city's commercial elite. Qassim used the Kirkuk events as a pretext to repress the ICP. He ordered the CP-led militia, the Popular Resistance Force, disbanded, arrested hundreds of Communist supporters and sealed the offices of the General Federation of Trade Unions (which had been taken over by the ICP). A plenum of the ICP Central Committee responded with an obsequious self-criticism declaring that its demand for participation in the government had been 'a mistake' because it 'led to the impairment of the party's relations with the national government;in other words, it displeased Qassim. The plenum declared a 'freeze' on Communist work in the army, and informed the ranks that it was carrying out an 'orderly retreat.' The Russians supported and demanded this. They sent to Baghdad, George Tallu, a member of the Iraqi Politburo, who had been undergoing medical treatment in Moscow, with an urgent request to the Iraqi party to avoid provoking Qassim, and to withdraw its bid to participate in the government.
In February 1963, the Ba'ath Party was able to broker a military coup that brought down Qassim and unleashed the counterrevolutionary furies. Using lists of Communists supplied by the CIA, the Ba'ath Party militia, the National Guard, launched a house-to-house search, rounding up and shooting suspected communists. An estimated 5,000 were killed and thousands more jailed; many of them hideously tortured by Saddam Hussein and others.
The CIA's role in the 1963 Ba'ath coup has been widely documented. King Hussein of Jordan told the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram shortly after the coup that he knew 'for a certainty that U.S. intelligence services provided names and addresses of Communists to be killed. The State Department has confirmed that Saddam Hussein and other Ba'athists had made contact with the American authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s; at this stage, the Ba'ath were thought to be the 'political force of the future,' and deserving of American support against Qassim and the Communists
Meanwhile, the ICP's record of betrayal was not forgotten. When Kurds rebelled against the Qassim regime in 1961, the ICP denounced their revolt as 'serving imperialist designs. In 1972, when Saddam Hussein allied for a while with the Soviet Union, two ICP leaders who had not had their eyes gouged out in his prisons joined his government. From 1972 the ICP has remained underground but with strong ties to the Iraqi GUFs (later called General Federation of Trades Unions - GFTU). The Kurds have been isolated from the ICP and the GFTUs and have concentrated their work in maintaining PKK union strongholds in Mosul and Kirkuk. The Kurds make up a powerful force in underground Iraqi unionism, both in the PUK and the KDP.
The State of Iraqi Unionism:
The Iraqi labour movement remained split and divided. The GFTU unions didn't just go away when their sponsor, 'Chemical Ali' went into American custody. They continued, largely under the same Ba'athist leadership, and remained affiliated to the World Federation of Trades Unions (WFTU) and the ICATU. They operated out of the same offices and published their newspaper. They had access to their bank accounts within Iraq and attended ICATU and WFTU meetings. Their constituent affiliated sectoral unions in the oil and transport sectors regularly attended meetings in Damascus and Amman. In fact, until the law of 1987 is changed or suspended, they remained the only 'legitimate' union organisation in Iraq.
Their rival organisation is the WDTUM which became the Iraqi Workers' Federation of Trades Unions or, as it likes to be called, the Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions (IFTU). This organisation is the recrudescence of the Iraqi Communist Party stalwarts plus some defected Ba'athists and the odd leftists and independents. These have no legal status as yet but function with a substantial following, largely because they were not the GFTU which was widely despised as a Saddam-era holdover. The claimed they have members in the petroleum, railway, food, transport, textile construction, printing and public sectors.
They say that they have twelve national union federations: oil, railways, mechanics, municipal services, public services, electricity, textiles, food, health, construction and printing and publishing. These are essentially all blue-collar employees. There are white-collar and professional organisations also affiliated to the IFTU, such as teachers, engineers and doctors. The IFTU made representations to the then Interim Governing Council (IGC) seeking the right of recognition as a legitimate union organisation. This was refused. Most importantly they sought to take over the GFTU apparatus and merge it into the IFTU. This would give them a newspaper, now called the 'Workers' Voice', a large number of offices, and a healthy bank account. It would also allow them to affiliate to the international labour bodies (ICATU, WFTU, etc.) which would give them legitimacy as a recognised part of the international labour movement.
Despite the fact that virtually all of the above-named 'leaders' came from the ranks of the Iraqi Communist Party or its front organisations (and paid a heavy price for such affiliation during the Saddam years) the ICATU refused to recognise them as the legitimate Iraqi national centre because 'they arrived at their success on the backs of American tanks'. They were told to come to some sort of an arrangement with the GFTU unions. The arrangement they had in mind was a merger in which the GFTU would be subsumed into the IFTU. This is the type of merger envisioned for the Russian Social Revolutionaries as they merged into the Bolshevik Party. Lenin's rival, Martov, characterised this type of merger as 'the merger of a hungry man with a piece of bread.'
In addition to the GFTU and the IFTU there was a blanket organisation known as the Union of the Unemployed. This is the labour wing of the Iraqi Communist Party. This Union of the Unemployed attempted a national strike which failed but was useful in enlisting the support of international unions who broadcast their support for democratic trades unionism in Iraq. As far as anyone can see, there is no labour organisation which seeks to represent the bread and butter issues of Iraqi working people. Virtually all of the organisations are political organisations and seek their successes in the political arena.
By the time of the liberation of Iraq in 2003, there were only the shells of the GFTUs still in operation in Iraq, plus the well-established communist and Kurdish underground union structures. These divergent strands of unionism finally managed, in September 2005, to achieve a basic unity.' The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) signed a historic merger statement with the leaders of the General Federation of Trade Unions (the old official trade union movement of Iraq) and the GFITU, which had split from the GFTU after the invasion. They celebrated their unity in 2007. The Kurds, of the KAWU, kept their distance but offered their support.
The Legacy of Oppression
The fundamental problem for the Iraqi unionists is that they are caught up in the sectarian and tribal battles of the country. In most countries of the world the trade union movement is one of three national organisations that transcend the boundaries of tribe, race, region, religion and language. The unions, as well as the military and student movements, are usually truly national organisations. They represent people from across the ethnic spectrum of the nation. In most countries of the developing world there is only a minor portion of the economy in private hands. The largest employer is the state, the regions or parastatal companies. This has meant that unions in these nations have had to use political power to win benefits and recognition from an employer whose budgets are set by committees and legislatures. The success of a union is thus measured by its clout in wresting concessions from a government with wider concerns than the welfare of its workers.
A second aspect is that the trades union movement tends to be anti-colonial and a haven for those who are denied political power through 'normal' channels. Trades unions across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East have a long history of fighting against colonial rule and sheltering in its ranks many who were denied a political platform by an occupying or controlling power. Despite the frequent linking of socialist, communist and liberal ideologies to the labour movements, the experience in practice has been that the workers are more patriotic than ideological. After all, it is they who are the 'common men' and who provide the bodies for the military forces. There are no end of ideologues who have been reduced to tears of frustration by the patriotism of working people in the face of an ideological challenge.
Nonetheless, trades unionism appeals to an ideology which is supposed to transcend narrow self-interest while at the same time proposing to fulfil those interests. In Iraq the reality is not too different from the model. The union structure gathers together Sunni, Shia, Arab and Kurd into one organisation. The existing legislation was supposed to give them a legitimate right to participate in the deliberations of the state in determining social priorities and delivery. The aim was to extend democracy into the workplace so that decisions and opportunities are made fairly and without prejudice.
The problem is that the current institutions of trade unionism are marching to a different drummer than the democratic needs of Iraqi workers. The Iraqi communists have always marched to Moscow's tune, even when it destroyed them. Their orders, support, cash and travel are supported from abroad. Despite the fact that the head of the WFTU is a Russian it is not clear that the support for the IFTU is coming from its traditional Soviet source. Evidence shows that this money was coming from countries like Libya and Syria (especially in the oil industry sector) as long as those two states were independent. Other funds arrived from unknown sources in the Middle East. The 'democratic unions' have established links overseas with U.S., British, Australian and European unions who support them in the name of 'democratic unionism' and as an opposition to the U.S.-British occupation. The GFTU had large bank accounts established under Saddam which it continued to use.
The link between workers and their unions has been subsumed under the problems of the political status of the unionists. Many have been jailed. Some have been assassinated. Yet others have been disappeared. This was before the current crisis. Now the IS forces are busy killing foreign workers whom they caught in the areas they occupy and are forcibly disbanding any organisation which is not part of the structure of Islamic fundamentalism. The legislation regularising the rights of labour and modifying the 1987 law is stalled in a parliament with no leader and less legitimacy.
There is also the fundamental problem of oil. The big multinational petroleum giants now run the nation's oil fields. Between 2009 and 2010, the Maliki government granted contracts for developing existing fields and exploring new ones to 18 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. When they started, the U.S. military provided the initial security umbrella protecting all of their field operations.
The oil companies did not want to deal with Iraqi unionists in the oil industry. It was the oil companies, in particular, who pressed the Ministry of Oil to enforce the 1987 law the government resurrected in 2003. As the Oil Ministry spokesman, Assam Jihad, told the Iraq Oil Report in 2010, 'Unionists instigate the public against the plans of the oil ministry to develop [Iraq's] oil riches using foreign development.' Therefore the government had to suppress dissent. This has been a recurrent theme in Iraq's oil industry. The oil companies get what they want: they get the oil concessions; they get a low rate of compensation for the land they use; they get a subsidised price for the oil to compensate them for the cost of drilling; and they get the social legislation which prevents dissent from spreading. Until recently the U.S military and the Department of Defense contracted private armies have stood behind the oil majors in suppressing this dissent.
Now things are changing. The IS has destroyed any hope of social development and progress in the areas they control. The Maliki government has refused to pay the workers what they are owed and have been conscripting and press-ganging workers into Shia militias to fight the IS occupiers. The legitimate unions fear the IS which seems to see any autonomous organisation by workers as a threat.
But IS is not alone in that. The Iraqi government has for years refused to give up Saddam Hussein's anti-trade union legislation, and several Iraqi political parties have tried to infiltrate unions or destabilise them for party political interests. Just days before ISIS entered Mosul in Northern Iraq, the ITU Vice-President in Mosul, Hussein Darwish, was assassinated on his way to work. He leaves behind six children. Family members of the previous ITU President, Ahmed Jassam Salih, were also assassinated recently.
The only safe place for unionists in Iraq is in the resurgent Kurdistan. There the Barzani-Talibani political accommodation has always included a role for the Kurdish workers and their organisations. They are also taking over the vast oilfields of Mosul and Kirkuk. As the rest of Iraqi descends into Shia-Sunni conflict and the world watches the introduction of Iranian fighters and Russian equipment into the battle, it seems as if Kurdistan will be the last hideout of Iraqi labour.
It is a pity it has come to this as there were great hopes for change in late 2013. The policy of allowing Maliki to choose the Shia and exclude the Sunni was a big mistake by the U.S. and the oil companies. يا واخد القرد على ماله يروح المال ويقعد القرد على حاله. (if you marry a monkey for his money, the money will go away and the monkey will stay the same)
