by GREG MUTTITT
“We strongly reject the privatization of our oil wealth, as well as production sharing agreements, and there is no room for discussing this matter. This is the demand of the Iraqi street, and the privatization of oil is a red line that may not be crossed.”
—Statement of Iraqi trade unions, December 2006
Fifty yards downhill from the polished shopping area, I entered the Middle East headquarters of the Solidarity Center, the AFL- CIO’s international arm. It was in an unmarked concrete office block on a dusty, rubble-strewn street. By late 2006, the center was hosting a new group of Iraqis every couple of weeks. Each contingent trained in workplace organizing, international labor standards and campaign communications.
On December 10, 2006, the Solidarity Center invited me to a workshop where eighteen Iraqi union leaders discussed Iraq’s oil situation and how it would affect them. Leaders of all five of Iraq’s trade union federations, each representing thousands of workers, sat around a long conference table with a plastic Iraqi flag at one end. Western newspapers didn’t even tell us Iraqi trade unions exist. Instead they usually suggested that meetings of Iraqis from mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds were likely to descend into chaos.
There were Sunni and Shi’a, Arabs and Kurds, the devout and the secular. The unions they represented had roots that went back decades; they had had widely disparate experiences under Saddam, under the Kurdish parties, and under the occupation: from co-optation and favoritism to marginalization and repression. Some of the unions had been all but wiped out by Saddam, living on only in the hearts and furtive whispers of the workers.
Hassan Juma’a was there with three colleagues from the Iraq Federation of Oil Unions from Basra. In meetings on oil, Hassan always stood tall. All of the unions were concerned about the future of Iraq’s oil and all had sections representing workers in the industry, but as the head of the only sector-specific union federation Hassan represented far more oil workers and knew the subject better than any of his colleagues.
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