Armed workers in Iraq:Top priority report on Iraqi labor movement

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

RN3280FV ARMED WORKING CLASS IN IRAQ

FORWARDING EWA'S JUST IN FROM BAGHDAD ASAP:

I'D SUGGEST THAT TIME-PRESSED READERS (DO I HAVE ANY WHO AIN'T?) START
NEAR THE END... max

From: Ewa Jasiewicz <freelance@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2003 10:09 PM
Subject: Report on condition ofworking class in Iraq Please forward:

The Most Powerful Men in the World, The Peroxide Spook and
The 25c Armed Picket Line

In the early morning rising smog, Baghdad's Daura Oil Refinery is a
warping shadow. In a car, crossing the Tigris, the concrete suspension
pillars of Daurra bridge axe my vision into rapid black and white
box-frames; the smogged city; the Daura flame; the filfth river; the
refinery warped. Nothing would be what it seemed today.

I'm on my way to meet freshly 'liberated' and unionized workers, with
an Occupation Watch delegation of US Labour Against the War and French
Trade Union activists. Cameras click as our cars swerve through the
rickety front gate and straight down a two-lane time-warp into a 1950s
oil community nightmare.


Daura was constructed in 1955 by British company Forstwheeler and
Kellogg, a neat precedent to the current reconstruction handover of
Daura to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. Halliburton
spearheaded the bomb-paved goldrush, securing an immediate no-bid
$71.3million dollar contract to repair and operate oil wells in Iraq.
Daura was fiercely bombed in the 1991 war and burned for 41 days.


This war round it avoided damage thanks to the protection of plucky
delegations of international human shields. Post blitz it was
protected from looters by the refinery's General Director Dathar 'God
Father' Khashab's personal 300-strong armed militia.

What capital creates, it destroys and re-delivers. The money spin of
the destruction and reconstruction industry is an appetite re-gorged
by war. Its jaws were most recently re-oiled by the 1999 Kosovo war
and the ensuing $10bn reconstruction scramble whereby several thousand
industrial facilities (with workers still inside them - the Zastavka
industrial complex in Kragujevac being the most well-covered example)
plus tens of bridges were obliterated. And of course Afghanistan, the
country the empire expected to roll over. 25 years of cold war
contortion and conflict had left Afghanistan in a hand-rubbingly
reconstruction-ready levelled state of infrastructural ground zero.
However, quick-profit forcasts fell as the Afghani resistance
escalated, resulting in un-reaped reconstruction costs of well over
the $15-20bn projected over the next five years. Meanwhile, the
killing, and the (re)-making fit, continues.


The first I heard of Dathar Khashab, Daurra refinery's 58-year-old
Director General, was from the nervous lips of a just-clocked in
worker in the refinery's rickety admissions office. It was 8am, buses
were wheezing in, workers were trooping out, and the 14 hour day-shift
at Daurra was just beginning.

He began by telling me of the Plant's most recent wildcat strike, one
of three in the past few weeks, catalysed by an anonymous engineer
independently from the refinery's new union. On October 10th, over 150
workers walked out in protest at long hours, poor pay and bad working
conditions. Most workers are still on CPA labelled 'emergency pay' of
$60 a month. The 30% wage rise of $18, plus the loans and land
promised by Bremer 3 months ago have yet to materialize.

A minute or two into our conversation, an unseen gesture from an
unseen source collared him back onto pro-boss track and he suddenly
began to talk about the worthless risk of the strike, how the manager
was a great man, a man who recognized and supported the organization
of the refinery's first independent trade union (*Alarm Bells*) and
that if anything was to happen to the manager himself, well then
they'd all strike in support of Him. He was trying, said the man,
words tumbling, hands pressing down his blue overalls unconsciously,
to secure more money for the workers but he was limited by the CPA,
and he was good, all good.


Khashab's office is situated in the large, Texan white ranch-like
Management house, surrounded by palm trees. Taken up a white walled,
winding stairwell, we enter, through three doors, his long, deep,
lofty room, equipped with glass coffee tables, long couches and wirey
men who dart in and out with trays of murkey sweet tea and water and
more tea.

Director Khashab mans a large mahogany desk, swathed in his own smoke,
with thuraya, CPA mobile and landline phones keeping him in touch of
all and everything he needs to know. A sunset oil painting of Daurra
at dusk, a perfect black industrial skeleton against a cummullous sky
of burnt orange and purple adornes the wall above his head. It's a
fantasy interpretation of the now battered, broken, monoxide filth and
steam seething complex, unrenovated since the 50s, conditions inside
the boiler room like a prison, a swealtering factorium of grime and
heat and steam and motion and ecological suicide in the making. There
is no canteen, rest rooms or respite for the 3000 workers who work
there.



'Privatisation is good because it keeps workers in fear'. The
blue-overalls wearing, Galoise chain-smoking, deep throat rasping,
shark-like oil don is sharing his thoughts with us on the
privatization of Iraq's oil industry. 'It keeps workers in fear of
their jobs'. 'Every worker here knows I control his life. If I sack
him I ruin his life, his family's life'. A good whip to crack on the
backbone of Iraq's most critical industry, the most powerful men in
the world, the working men keeping Iraq's black gold pumping, Europe's
industrial appetite sated, and the American Occupation
Administration's hands full.

An unruly bunch shut down the country's biggest refinery in Basra last
week in a solid one-day strike. The story went unreported in the
international media.


Little is known on the ground here about it either or the methods used
to repress or resolve it. The strikes at Daurra, totaling three in the
past 2 weeks did not happen according to Khashab. 'The protests you
mean? These were not strikes. A strike is when you shut down the whole
plant.


This happened in Basra, it didn't happen here' he rasped. 'I wish I
could have solved the protest by peaceful means but, well..' he
shrugged and laughed raspily and never elaborated on the means he did
use, but, his faithful unionists backed him up. 'We can't have any
more stoppages. More stoppages will harm the country' they said.
National interest before class interest, government interests before
human interests, the key to class submission, the key to all class
empowerment suppression.


Khashab's throat is sore from 'all my talking with the workers the
other day he he he'. He laughs throatily. Khashab is well known in
worker circles as a former Baathist. Any worker hoping to rise through
the ranks had to capitulate to the Baath. Any worker holding any
position in the oil industry crucial to its physical operation, its
technological survival - had to be loyal to the party. Noone outside
the party or with any potential to revolt, to seize the means of the
regime's wealth production, could know how to operate the key parts of
any refinery.


Technicians were trained in camps in Kuwait. If allegiance was
pledged, promotion was rocket-swift. It's unclear what position
Khashab held in 1972 and 1978 when 20 and 18 workers were shot dead at
Daurra, respectively. But Worker Communist Party members widely refer
to him as 'a fascist'.


The Daurra Oil Refinery Trade Union was rig-voted into existence 2
weeks ago (as two workers told us, far from the plant sat in the
safety of a barbed wire and concrete block surrounded Karrada hotel).
Not only is it welcomed by the boss, but it is also recognized by the
General Confederation of Iraqi Worker Trades - a body of revamped (or
not, noone will tell) unions, some still allegedly led by former
Baathists, and currently controlled by the Communist Party of Iraq.

The union is recognized 'unofficially' by the Ministry of Oil and the
CPA. This is an anomaly seeing as neither the Confederation nor any
trade union in Iraq has been officially recognized by the Occupation
Authorities because officially, in law, they do not exist.


Representatives at the Confederation's squatted simple, deskless, and
almost chair-less office in the middle of Alawi Hilla Bus Garage,
Baghdad, told us they'd submitted requests for recognition to the CPA
three times but to no avail. Furthermore, the CPA (referred to from
here on as the OA - Occupation Authorities) deny the existence of
workers in Iraq full-stop, just as their predecessors did.


In 1987, the Baath passed a law which banned strikes and officially
deleted the existence of 'workers' in Iraq, redefining them as 'civil
servants' - employees of the state. Trade unions were no longer
necessary, the socialist state was taking care of workers' rights so
what need was there to create unions or strike? The CPA has
deliberately opted not to repeal this law, leaving workers in a legal
and industrial identity limbo - just the way a newly asserting itself
regime likes it.

The Occupation Watch delegation visited the Ministry of Labour and
Social Affairs to enquire precisely as to what had become of this law
and the status of working people in Iraq. The Minister himself left
for Kuwait the day beforehand, allegedly due to death threats
following the Baghdad Hotel bombing, which was aimed at killing the
entire cabinet. Instead we were treated to the two-"man" (?) show of
Dr Noori, the Ministry's internal co-ordinator and external affairs
man and the surprise presence of a peroxide-haired, slender,
glasses-donned 30-something English guard-dog.

Irene Findley was her name and she said she was an adviser to the
Ministry. What to say, what not to say? Public Affairs. Damage
Limitation. Policy Control. She sat and wrote down all our names and
everything we said before giving us a speech on how the Ministries are
working Very closely with the CPA (indistinguishable it seems),
covering everything from the setting up of Trade Unions to Child
Protection.


However, democracy takes time to deliver, the CPA is concentrating on
restoring power and water supplies (6 months on and still trying) and
also (curiously) how so many TU representatives from all over the
world had been visiting the ministry that they didn't know quite what
to do with them all. But 'My advice is that I don't want the minister
to spend all his time discussing trade union matters' she said.
Finally. And with a few more well-rehearsed non-committal,
non-informative statements on law enforcement, democracy, security and
how the Ministry has succeeded in creating an application form for
unemployment benefit -cash benefits still so far being confined just
to ex regime cops and soldiers whilst the ordinary 10 million
unemployed continue to suffer - the peroxide 'spook', job done,
boundaries set, Minister briefed, got up and left.


Dr Noori, humiliated, nervously and protractedly followed his orders
and dodged our question on whether the 1987 Baathist anti-Union,
anti-Worker law had been repealed no less than three times, spelling
out to us clearly, a resounding 'No'. Child Labour however, he told us
proudly, had been made illegal. The country's most unthreatening and
powerless sector of the population has had (unenforceable on pain of
parental revolt) legislation delivered concerning it. The working
class however, explosive to any regime or system when organized and
conscious of its own power to seize, halt or reclaim the means of
production and profit - remains repressed.


>From the militancy absorbent and struggle-co-opting phoney union of
Daurra to the autonomous Nahrawhan Brick Factory Union, organized 2
months ago with the help of an activist from the Worker Communist
Party.


Members Fahed Owada, Shahel Ghatta, Farhan Hassan and Nizar Abdel
Hussein risked their jobs to come and speak to us about their ongoing
struggle. Nahrawahn, 30km east of Baghdad, is a complex of 150
factories, employing 15,000 workers, housing approximately 7,500, and
churning out thousands of bricks daily.

Men, women and children are employed there, working 14 hour days for
3000 to 750 (child wage) per day - approximately $1.50 to 60c per
day - the equivalent of the price of a melon smoothie at Baghdad's
gleaming mercenary and petrol yuppie frequenting Hamra Hotel, 20
falafel sandwiches, a 30min taxi ride to and from Baghdad Jadeed to
Kharadda Dakhil, 4 cans of Pepsi or a weeks worth of bread, just
bread, for a family.


Entire families are employed at Nahrwahn, ages 6 to 60 being
represented in the workforce. 7,500 workers live on site in dire Boss
rented accommodation. There are no health benefits, no holiday pay and
no medical aid for injuries. Boys under 14 load up trucks with bricks,
setting them in neat order. Boys aged 14-up work retrieving the bricks
from the factory's 30m tall, 15m wide, 750 degree raging furnace.

Those who enter the hell protect themselves with their own clothing -
no fireproof suits or overalls are provided. They wear 2 sets of
underwear, 2 shirts, jumpers, two sets of trousers, a shirt and a
keefayah around the head, 4 or 5 pairs of socks, and gloves made from
old punctured inner tyre tubes. Those emerging usually drop to the
ground on normal-air impact. Hands placed in warm water are cooled
cold instantly.


Black oil powers the furnace, 'the worst kind' we are told, wafting
chemical dioxides throughout the factory. Respiratory illnesses are
common, as are preventable accidents. One man lost seven children last
year when a part of the oven collapsed on top of them. As he was from
a powerful tribe, he was compensated commensurately ($900,000) by the
owner. Those from weaker families are not so fortunate.

A 24-year-old woman sleeping on her break during the nightshift was
overcome by gas and died. The factory owner told her father - its not
my problem, its yours.


There is no clean water to drink, workers drink from the river, no air
conditioning (fans), no bathrooms (workers must walk out into the
dessert to relieve themselves) and due to no contracts, any worker can
be dismissed at any time. 'You have to see it to believe it. You can't
work as a human being in such a place', told us Shahel.


On Saturday October 11th, 75% of the workforce decided enough was
enough and went on strike. 300-400 workers marched to the owners
office and demanded social security, retirement payment, onsite
medical aid facilities, contracts and a rise in wages. The owner had
no idea that a union had been formed and told them, 'Fine, strike, go,
I will dismiss you, others will come to take your place'.

The workers responded by going to their homes, bringing out their guns
and spontaneously forming an armed picketline. Manned with machineguns
and kalishnikovs, workers guarded their factory and defended their
strike from demolition by scab labour.

The owner, overpowered, ended up granting the workers a rise of 500
dinars - 25c, and agreed to enter into negotiations regarding social
and health benefits. The strike was regarded all round as a massive
success.

The unionized workers, empowered by their victory, have ideas about
improving their conditions and keeping the owners in check. 'The Union
must control the fuel in the ovens. Then the factory owner will obey
us', says Farhan. 'Each factory has its own share of gasoline from the
government. If we co-operate with the ministry of oil and the owner
breaks health and safety rules then the ministry must stop his supply
of oil'.

Whether the Ministry will be willing to recognize an independent and
militant union such as the Nahrwahn brickmakers and take their side
when there appear to be no laws whatsoever guaranteeing the rights of
safety of workers in Iraq is debatable.

'We know that we will be sacked when we return to Nahrawahn', says
Farhan, 'But we are willing to risk this for the rights of the other
workers'. One thing is certain though. Undercurrents of resistance,
solidarity, autonomous organizing and a rejection of Occupation,
ex-Baathist boss or unionist imposed authority are alive and striking
in Iraq right now and they need support urgently.






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