Unionism in Iraq

A proud tradition of trade unionism is building muscle with British help. Owen Tudor of TUC Aid describes the fight.

 

Shortly after the Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, a British army officer in Basra reported back to London on the state of the economy.

‘What these people need,’ he said, ‘is a union.’

 

Trade unionism in Iraq has a long history – in one notable effort, a million people marched against royal rule in the late 1950s – but Saddam Hussein took the movement over, eventually banning trade unionism altogether.

 

This meant that workers in Iraq spent a generation with unions which were at best transmission routes for Ba’athist diktats, and at worst an arm of the secret police. Illustrating the worst case, Chemical Ali, the Ba’athist leader who committed atrocities in Kurdistan, was at one stage imposed as head of the Ba’athist trade union movement.

 

As a result, the absence of a free and independent trade union movement is one of the lasting scars of Saddam Hussein’s period of rule. Under the Ba’athists, Iraqi workers had no one to defend them against their employers, against privatisation, or against redundancies. An entire generation has no experience of peaceful dispute resolution or running its own organisations.

And yet, soon after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled, Iraqi trade unions re-formed.

 

People who were released from jail, returning from exile and emerging from the Iraqi Underground joined together in a union that crossed religious, ethnic and political boundaries, and was committed to equality and independence from government. The official trade union movement split into a religious wing and a Ba’athist group, and other workers’ organisations also sprang up.

In February 2004, I took part in an international trade union delegation to Iraq to meet the new trade union movement.

 

They took us to an oil refinery and a mass meeting of workers. In a clear indication of vibrant grassroots democracy, the workers there ignored the foreign visitors and quizzed their union leaders about bread and butter issues such as health and safety and wages.

 

During our visit we heard stories that have now become familiar: about workers responding to the disruption caused by the invasion, and sleeping in their factories or workplaces to guard them against looters.

 

These were people committed to rebuilding Iraq. They were also committed to democracy, liberty and peaceful resolution of disputes – all central to trade union activity.

 

We also journeyed to Iraqi Kurdistan, where trade unions had operated freely since the first Gulf War. They were well organised (even hairdressers have their own union) but isolated from the rest of the world, effectively trapped within their beautiful mountains in the north of Iraq.

 

They quickly reached an agreement with their Iraqi colleagues that built unity across the Iraqi/Kurd divide, based on mutual respect and recognition of diversity.

 

Kurdish teacher unions provided holidays away from the violence and disruption for their fellow Iraqi teachers working in harsher conditions.

 

In the years since, trade unions in Iraq have suffered violence from terrorists and former Ba’athists, and repression from the government, which has continued to use Saddam Hussein’s labour laws against them.

 

Many brave trade union leaders – journalists, printers, health workers – have been assassinated, while teachers have been threatened with death for teaching about equality and human rights. But they have continued to campaign for living wages, against oil privatisation and so on, peacefully, publicly and persistently.

 

Alongside and supporting this work, TUC Aid has aimed to sustain and develop trade unionism and, in particular, to promote day-to-day experiences of negotiating, decision making and democracy.

 

Training about union structures by our public services union, Unison, encouraged the Iraqi Teachers’ Union to hold regular elections and change its leadership twice over. And last year union work on equality led to the election of Hashemiya Muhsin

 

Hussein (the leader of Basra’s electricity workers), to the global executive of the international power workers (ICEM). She is an incredible role model for women in Iraq and the first Iraqi for a generation to be elected to that body.

 

Some of our unions have formed strong links with their opposite numbers in Iraq and Kurdistan, like the firefighters who were so appalled at the poor equipment supplied to their colleagues that they drove several fire tenders loaded with equipment all the way across Europe, as a donation.

 

Our teachers’ union provided a group of Iraqi teachers with a week of respite at their training centre in the Midlands (where they developed recruitment materials in between trips to see Shakespeare in Arabic at Stratford, and enjoying the dubious delights of watching a Kidderminster Harriers football match).

 

We have put special effort into rebuilding the Iraqi and Kurdish unions’ links with trade unionists in the rest of the world, hosting delegations of transport workers and teachers to the UK, and ensuring that Iraqi and Kurdish unions were able to take part in the formation of a new, single international trade union movement, the ITUC.

 

Sometimes we have contributed to sadder occasions. When my opposite number in Baghdad – Hadi Saleh – was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by former Ba’athists, TUC Aid paid for the memorial his union and his family wanted to erect, and published a book about his struggles and those of the whole Iraqi trade union movement.

 

The trade union movement in Iraq is similar to many other union movements in countries emerging from dictatorship and conflict (although its long and powerful history means it has more in common with those in developed economies). It gives working people a voice in decisions being made about their livelihoods and holds government to account. Being involved in a workplace union involves people in practical activities that involve compromise, negotiation and accountability.

 

Especially in divided societies, unions have to represent that diversity, so there is an inherent tendency towards a belief in equality and non-sectarianism. That doesn’t mean it’s easy for unions to avoid all of the tensions that occur in the societies they belong to – trade unions in developed countries also find it a challenge to involve women in positions of leadership, for example – but it means that they are willing to try, and TUC Aid is helping them to do so.

 

Owen Tudor is TUC aid secretary and head of the TUC European Union and International Relations Department.

This article appears in the latest issue of Engage magazine, from NCVO.

Advertisement

Tags: Civil society, Iraq, TUC, Unions