[R-G] Why Iraqis oppose U.S.-backed oil law Workers think foreign firms will take over

[Anthony Fenton]

Why Iraqis oppose U.S.-backed oil law Workers think foreign firms  
will take over
by David Bacon
	
August 21, 2007
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=13580

Across the political spectrum in Washington, members of Congress are  
now demanding that the Iraqi government meet certain benchmarks,  
which presumably would show that it's really in charge. But there's a  
big problem with the most important benchmark: the oil law. It is  
extremely unpopular in Iraq.

Congress has been told the law is a way to share oil wealth among  
Iraq's regions and religious sects. Iraqis see it differently. They  
say the law will turn over the oil fields to foreign companies,  
giving them control over setting royalties, deciding production  
levels, and even determining whether Iraqis get to work in their own  
industry.



Under Washington's guidance, the Iraqi government wrote the oil law  
in secret deliberations. It needed secrecy to obscure the fact that  
it gives foreign corporations control over exploration and  
development in one of the world's largest oil reserves, through  
agreements called "production-sharing" contracts. Such deals are so  
disadvantageous that they have been rejected by most oil-producing  
countries, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates  
and otherwise conservative regimes throughout the Middle East.



The leaders of the Iraqi opposition to the oil law are the industry's  
workers. In early June, the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions shut  
pipelines from the Rumeila fields near Basra, in the south, to  
Baghdad and the rest of the country. Their main demand was that oil  
remain in public hands, although they also sought to force the  
government to improve conditions for workers.



Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki responded by calling out units  
of the 10th Division of the Iraqi army and surrounding the strikers  
at Sheiba, near Basra. U.S. aircraft buzzed the strikers as well,  
while al-Maliki issued arrest warrants for the union's leaders.  
Facing the possibility, however, that the strike would escalate into  
shutdowns on the rigs themselves, cutting off oil exports, al-Maliki  
blinked. He agreed to hold off implementation of the oil law until  
October, giving the union a chance to propose alternatives.



This undoubtedly increased al-Maliki's troubles in Washington, where  
failure to move on the oil law benchmark has been held as evidence of  
weakness and incompetence. In Iraq, however, al-Maliki faces a fact  
that U.S. policymakers refuse to recognize: The oil industry is a  
symbol of Iraqi nationhood.



Because of its actions, the oil workers union has become one of the  
strongest voices of Iraqi nationalism, protecting an important symbol  
of Iraq's national identity, and, more important, the only source of  
income capable of financing the country's post- occupation  
reconstruction.



U.S. legislators trying to impose the oil law might note that they  
are requiring the Iraqi government to betray one of the few reasons  
Iraqis have for supporting it - its ability to keep oil revenue in  
public hands.



Some of the oil workers' other demands reflect the desperate  
situation of workers under the occupation. They want their employer,  
the government oil ministry, to pay wage increases and promised  
vacations, and give permanent status to thousands of temporary  
employees. In a country where housing has been destroyed on a huge  
scale and workers often live in dilapidated and primitive conditions,  
the union wants the government to turn over land for building homes.



Every year, the Oil Institute, a national technical training college  
for the industry's workers and technicians, has miraculously  
continued holding classes. Yet the ministry won't give work to  
graduates, despite the war-torn industry's desperate need for skilled  
labor. The union demands jobs and a future for Iraq's young people.



Fighting for these demands makes the union even more popular and  
further enhances its nationalist credentials. Many Iraqis see it  
defending the interests of the millions of workers who have to make a  
living and keep their families eating in the middle of a war zone.  
Conversely, the United States, which imposed a series of low-wage  
laws at the beginning of the occupation, looks bent on enforcing  
poverty.



Iraq has a long labor history. Union activists, banned and jailed  
under the British and their puppet monarchy, organized a labor  
movement that was the admiration of the Arab world when Iraq became  
independent after the revolution of 1958. When Saddam Hussein came to  
power, though, he drove its leaders underground, killing or  
imprisoning the ones he could catch.



When Hussein fell, Iraqi unionists came out of prison, up from  
underground and back from exile, determined to rebuild the labor  
movement. Miraculously, in the midst of war and bombings, they did.  
The oil workers union in the south is now one of the largest  
organizations in Iraq, with thousands of members on the rigs,  
pipelines and refineries. The electrical workers union is the first  
national labor organization headed by a woman, Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein.



Together with other unions in railroads, hotels, ports, schools and  
factories, they've gone on strike, held elections, won wage increases  
and made democracy a living reality. Yet the Bush administration, and  
the Baghdad government it controls, has outlawed collective  
bargaining, continuing to enforce a decree originally issued by  
Hussein in 1987 banning unions in the public sector.



The al-Maliki government has seized all union funds and turned its  
back on a wave of assassinations of union leaders. After the June  
strike, Iraq's oil minister ordered oil industry officials to refuse  
to recognize or bargain with the oil worker unions. Iraq's oil  
industry was nationalized in the 1960s, like that of every other  
country in the Middle East. The Iraqi oil union became, and remains,  
the industry's most zealous guardian.



When Halliburton Corp. went into Iraq in the wake of the troops in  
2003, the company tried to seize control of wells and rigs,  
withholding reconstruction aid to force workers to submit. The oil  
union struck for three days in August 2003, stopping exports and  
cutting off government revenue. Halliburton then closed its Basra  
offices and left the oil region.



The oil and port unions compelled other foreign corporations to give  
up agreements under which the U.S. occupation gave them control of  
Iraq's deepwater ports. Muhsin's electrical union is still battling  
to stop subcontracting in the power stations, a prelude to corporate  
takeover of a public resource.



Iraqi nationalists make sharp accusations that the occupation has an  
economic agenda, including the wholesale privatization of the Iraqi  
economy. Paul Bremer, formerly head of the Coalition Provisional  
Authority, published lists in Baghdad newspapers of Iraqi public  
enterprises he intended to auction off. Arab labor leader Hacene  
Djemam bitterly observed, "War makes privatization easy: First you  
destroy society, then you let the corporations rebuild it."



Hassan Juma'a Awad, president of the oil workers federation, wrote a  
letter to the U.S. Congress on May 13. "Everyone knows the oil law  
doesn't serve the Iraqi people," he warned. The proposed new statute  
"serves Bush, his supporters and foreign companies at the expense of  
the Iraqi people. ... The USA claimed that it came here as a  
liberator, not to control our resources."



The unions have vowed to strike if the law is implemented. At the  
occupation's end, the government in Baghdad will need control of the  
oil wealth to rebuild a devastated country. That gives Iraqis a big  
reason to fight to protect public ownership and control of the oil  
industry.





[David Bacon is author of "The Children of NAFTA" (University of  
California, 2004) and "Communities Without Borders" (Cornell  
University, 2006) and reported from Iraq in 2003 and 2005. He was the  
board chairman of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant  
Rights.]



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This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle