An Anti-Labor Line in the Sand

BAGHDAD — For most Iraqis, oil used to seem like a blessing. It raised their standard of living during the 1960s to near-First World levels. Then it began to seem more like a curse, financing war and a brutal dictatorship. It was oil, many believe, that drew the covetous attention of foreign powers, most recently the United States. Now, for some Iraqis, oil is simply a commodity their children sell by the roadside to passing cars, the way poor farmers in the San Joaquin Valley once sold peaches and strawberries at highway fruit stands.

At the Al Daura refinery on the outskirts of Baghdad -- one of three such huge installations in Iraq -- the plant manager knows workers can't live on their salaries, which average $60 per month, so to keep them working he gives them oil, which their children hawk daily outside the plant.

Before the war, workers received bonuses, profit-sharing and food and housing allowances to supplement their small incomes. Now, although salaries remain the same, that additional income has been eliminated by U.S. occupation authorities.

In plants and factories all over Iraq, workers are quickly organizing unions. They want better wages. They want shorter hours (workers at the refinery and elsewhere often work 11- and 13-hour shifts without additional pay). They want safety shoes, goggles, masks and other protective gear. Most of all, they want a voice in the future of their jobs.

But in their quest for what they see as simple fairness in the workplace, they are encountering a determined foe: the Coalition Provisional Authority. Whenever the new unions try to talk with the managers or ministries that operate the plants, they're told that a law passed by Saddam Hussein in 1987 is still being enforced by the CPA. This law says that workers in state-owned enterprises (where the majority of Iraqis work) have no right to form unions or to bargain for contracts.

The law violates at least two conventions of the United Nations' International Labor Organization. But on June 5, CPA chief L. Paul Bremer III backed up this decree with another that Iraqi union activists say bans strikes and demonstrations that would disrupt economic activity.

U.S. funding in Iraq seems primarily focused on two things -- an overwhelming military presence and the transformation of the Iraqi economy from one in which the bulk of industry is state-owned to one in which it is in private hands. Both are key parts of a plan to make the country attractive to foreign investors, who, Bremer seems to feel, might find the presence of unions a disincentive to investment. And nothing can stand in the way of privatization.