born 1976, political Scientist and freelance journalist
[15/02/2010]
Early in the morning, the board of the Oil Workers Trade Union meets in the headquarters of the SOC (Southern Oil Company). They are worried about their future and they have called for an emergency meeting. While the country is renovating and conceding oil concessions to foreign companies, a decision approved by the Oil Ministry on the 17th of July, 2007 is ratified. This regulation leaves the trade unions excluded from decisions concerning Iraqi oil. About three weeks ago, President Nuri Al Maliki gave an order affecting all the levels of the administration, forbidding any meeting with them. This obviously excludes the possibility of negotiating any collective agreement regarding wages or work conditions. The banning of a syndicate that is working without recognized regulations seems impending and they are preparing for any scenario. There is tension in the air; it becomes apparent when the president of the syndicate starts the meeting with a prayer in remembrance of the prophet Muhammad. Various members protest, defending a secularism that is receding even in the (leftist) trade unions.
The decision to exclude the syndicates from the process of collective negotiation (a new concept in Iraq) goes back two decades. On the 11th of March 1987, Sadam Hussein's regime passed a Law Code that, in its articles 150 and 151, redefined workers as civil servants, banning their right to form unions, establishing the General Trade Union Federation of Iraq as the "unique and vertical trade union" of the regime. The oil workers know its words by heart, "the concept of the worker is banned and it is substituted by that of the state employee". Without the right to form free trade unions.
None of the successive governments have passed a new trade union law that would allow them go back to an open and stable unionism. Decree 8750 of the Coalition Provisional Authority, passed by Paul Bremer, ratified the situation of "para-legality" in the Iraqi oil unions. They are allowed to work de facto but without recognizing their right to do so. They cannot collect membership fees nor figure in recognized negotiators in any decision making process. The decision to definitely ban the union may be taken any day, something that is present in the air, according to Abdullah Al Maliki, a member of the political executive committee of the union. "The number of workers contacting with us is increasingly low. Those who come and tell us the problems of their refineries become frustrated because as a union we are not allowed access to them. The workers lose motivation and the union gets weaker".
This morning, the workers are discussing on how to move their headquarters from their present office, in a situation of absolute irregularity, to the premises of the public oil company. They fear, quite rightly, that the government might evict them, any moment, from the office they currently -and illegally- use, even using force if they deem it convenient and hence moving them into absolute clandestinity. They find it hard to believe that, while the country recovers, certain fundamental liberties are reduced and the situation is comparable to the one lived under the previous regime.
Abdullah Al Maliki, who is no relation of the Prime Minister with the same surname, and Faruk Ismaeel, his Secretary General, know each other, have shared affiliation and fought together since the Union took its first steps in Basra, in 1971. According to Al Maliki, "We have been working for nearly four decades without having our rights recognized, without having a stable relationship with the company and without regularizing our capacity to openly finance ourselves".
42.000 oil workers, in the main economic activity of the Iraqi economy, are deprived de facto of their association right in the three southern Iraqi provinces of Basra, Nassiriya and Misan. From this region, about 2,3 million oil barrels are exported every day. And about 50% of the workers are in the orbit of the Trade Union Federation, always according to their own -and possibly exaggerated- numbers, and they are only able to meet with the company management when they are seriously threatening to strike. "We do not want to have demonstrations of force as the only avenue for negotiation in order to maintain our purchasing power, as has been the case these last years. We are tired. We want the constitution to recognize the role of the workers in the distribution of the national wealth and we want the working conditions you would expect in any democratic country".
Farouk Ismaeel summarizes the situation quite clearly. "With the barrels at 70 dollars, just one day with the pipes closed means that the companies and the state lose 140 million dollars. And since 2005 we have been forced to adopt this extreme measure three times. In one of these occasions we managed to completely stop exportation during three consecutive days and we have been capable of confronting both the British army and the Iraqi government when necessary, but we must avoid the use of force. They must recognize us as negotiators, allowing us to organize official union delegations in each company".
Even if the union declares itself apolitical, it is obvious that most of its members come from a previous communist militancy. When questioned about the success of their strikes in a context of extreme violence like the Iraqi one and about their relationship with the militias, they end up admitting that if the strikes were a success it was largely due to the indirect use of this conflict by the Mahdi Army, who guaranteed their security against possible interventions of the British army -present in Basra in those days-, a force that the militia was intent in weakening. These times are more than past for the workers, who admit that the militias played a key role in the resistance against the occupation, but who are also aware of the fractional terrorism they all succumbed to, victims of the external political agendas they had to follow and of the imposition of religious and reduced visions of the social rules and customs.
The President of the Trade Union Federation, hassan Jumah, sums up the situation with great simplicity: "While the government gives concessions to foreign companies, the national companies lose power of decision and technological renovation. The workers sometimes get paid too often for not working because not enough money is invested in their equipment and we import foreign machinery that nobody teaches us how to use. We complain because this is nearly always the first step towards privatization and the sale through auction of increasing sectors of our economy, the loss of control over our resources and the destruction of our economic structure. The Iraqi people would be able to maintain production by themselves. But the government intends to dismantle the sate-owned companies and to depend exclusively on foreign ones. ".
They assure that, even if they do not have the worst working conditions in the country, the oil workers of southern Iraq earn about a third of the wages paid in Oman, Saudi Arabia, or in the Arab Emirates for the same job. Even in Iraqi Kurdistan, the salaries double those of the south. Jumah insists that "This year they tried to cancel our yearly bonus and the revision of the salaries according to inflation. This kind of pressure forces our best technicians to emigrate to Kurdistan or abroad. It is not a question of economic saving, it is about destroying our work capacity and the migration of qualified and organized professionals".
Farouk concedes that "progress has been made in the field of security. And the living conditions of the population have improved in that sense. But the economic crisis is absolute and most of our legislators do not have the experience or the necessary time to work in the construction of modern and democratic state structure that would allow the country to grow properly" The Secretary General explains that "the Trade Union Federation asked a commission of lawyers to prepare a Trade Union Law that the Parliament has so far refused to debate. A country without collective negotiation between companies, trade unions and government is no democracy. The Iraqi constitution and democracy are still babies that we have to raise with our joint efforts".
The oil unions work in a context that allows us to avoid mentioning the obvious relationship between the fall of the previous regime and the interests of the present government, protected by the American administration, when it comes to managing the Iraqi national resources. And now the chickens have come home to roost. It is difficult to imagine how a country's wealth can be put to auction in a context of demonstrations by the civil society and it is easy to understand the problems this society has in organizing itself, if we bear in mind the context of surrendering to foreign companies the oil concessions.
As a previous step towards times that are expected to be bleak, the only firm decision taken in the emergency meeting is a monthly contribution of a thousand dinars (about 0,80 euros) from each member, in order to rent an apartment to which they can move their archives and where they can meet safely. Hassan Jumah, president of the Union, reminisces about the first meeting in the Sixties in the Basra cafes as a way of encouraging those present. The problem, and the difference, is that they are no longer adolescents. The youngest person in the meeting is 58 years old.