CORPWATCH: Iraq: Labor Upsurge Wins Support from US Unions

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http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11502


"Once the US occupation of Iraq began over a year ago, Iraqi workers lost no time in reorganizing their country's labor movement. Labor activity spread from Baghdad to the Kurdish north, with the center of the storm in the south, in the oil and electrical installations around Basra, and the port of Um Qasr.

Workers quickly discovered that the occupation authorities had little respect for labor rights, however. Once the Coalition Provisional Authority took power in Baghdad in March of 20003, it began enforcing a 1987 law banning unions in public enterprises, where most Iraqis are employed. To this CPA head Paul Bremer added Public Order #1, banning pronouncements that "incite civil disorder, rioting or damage to property." The phrase civil disorder can easily apply to organizing strikes, and leaders of both the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions and Iraq's Union of the Unemployed have been detained a number of times.

Labor repression in Iraq, however, has provoked US unions into speaking out against the war and occupation in a way unseen since Ronald Reagan's wars in Central America. Bremer's hostility towards labor made it onto the radar screen of US unions last fall, when a delegation sent by US Labor Against the War to make contact with the country's reborn workers' movement brought back accounts of the suppression of labor rights. This spring USLAW, encompassing U.S. unions and labor councils representing hundreds of thousands of members, organized a fund-raising campaign for Iraq's new unions. This June in Geneva, Neil Bisno, secretary-treasurer of SEIU Local 1199P, delivered $5,000 checks to the IFTU and the Workers Councils and Unions of Iraq."