by David Bacon, The ProgressiveOctober 3rd, 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 facedown 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
