Iraqi Workers Strike to Keep Their Oil

Photojournalist and trade unionist David Bacon sends this report on the Iraqi oil workers’ strike.

The Bush administration has no love for unions anywhere. But in Iraq it has a special reason for hating them. They are the main opposition to the occupation’s economic agenda and the biggest obstacle to that agenda’s centerpiece—the privatization of Iraq’s oil.

At the same time, unions have become the only force in Iraq trying to maintain at least a survival living standard for the millions of Iraqis who still have to go to work every day in the middle of the war.

Last week, Iraqi anger over starvation incomes and oil rip-offs boiled over. On June 4, the biggest and strongest of the Iraqi unions, the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU), launched a limited strike to underline its call for keeping oil in public hands and to force the government to live up to its economic promises. Workers on the pipelines carrying oil from the rigs in the south to Baghdad’s big refinery stopped work. It was a very limited job action, which still allowed the Iraqi economy to function.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki responded by calling out the army and surrounding the strikers at Sheiba, near Basra. Then he issued arrest warrants for the union’s leaders. On June 6, the union postponed the strike until June 11. Rather than resume the strike, the workers returned to the bargaining table. (Click here for AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s response to the Iraqi government’s actions against the strikers.)