Labor Rights in "Liberated" Iraq

[Ramo]

I know Shrub and his boys don't like unions, worker rights, democracy and so forth, but honestly I figured that they'd have the sense to wait until the influence of the US was less visible before they started to clamp down on peaceful worker organization.

According to Counterpunch, the US decided to clamp down on the fastest growing union in the country:

On July 29, US occupation forces in Iraq arrested a leader of Iraq's new emerging labor movement, Kacem Madi, along with 20 other members of the Union of the Unemployed. The unionists had been conducting a sit-in to protest the treatment of unemployed Iraqi workers by the US occupation authority, and the fact that contracts for work rebuilding the country have been given overwhelmingly to US corporations.

The workers are in pretty desperate straights as you might imagine. According to the article:

The unemployment rate is over 50% in cities like Baghdad. Madi estimates that four million Iraqi workers have no jobs. Thousands of public-sector workers employed by the former government lost their jobs after the war. Many provided services from healthcare to education, and those services have yet to be restored. There is no money to pay those workers, nor an Iraqi government to employ them. Even the records of their employment went up in flames in the looting which followed the occupation of Baghdad.

According to a report by USLAW about the businesses contracted for Iraqi reconstruction:

* Stevedoring Services of America. SSA was a leader in last year's efforts by Pacific Coast shippers to lock out west coast longshore workers, and worked with the Bush administration to threaten the International Longshore and Warehouse Union with breaking up its coastwise agreement and bringing troops onto the docks. ILWU spokesperson Steve Stallone called SSA "ideologically anti-union and anti-ILWU."

* MCI Worldcom. Worldcom has a long record of opposing worker efforts to organize. It declared bankruptcy in 2002 after fraudulently claiming $11 billion in earnings. As a result, the retirement savings of thousands of workers were completely wiped out, along with $2.6 billion in public pension funds. The Iraq contract was awarded after the company was fined $500 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission for its illegal fraud.

* Eight of the eighteen companies with the major contracts are completely non-union. Almost all have records of fighting any union organizing effort.

The USLAW report also discusses the track record of social responsibility of the corporations involved. It found a long history of corporate corruption and bribery (Halliburton Corp., which still pays $1 million a year to former director Vice President **** Cheney), organizing mercenary armies (Dyncorp/Computer Sciences Corp.), and years of cooperation with repressive governments, from Hussein's regime itself (Halliburton again, and San Francisco's Bechtel Corp.) to the former apartheid regime in South Africa (Fluor Corp.)

The businesses contracted also have had a habit of bringing in foreign labor to minimize worker freedoms:

At the same time, the issue of the foreign contracts has become a hot controversy among Iraqi workers because the US corporations bring workers into the country to work under those contracts. A Kuwaiti firm subcontracting to the US construction giant Kellogg, Brown and Root, for instance, was recently found to be bringing Asian workers into the port of Basra to perform repair and reconstruction work. Meanwhile, Iraqi workers with long years of experience sit idle.

This is consisent with Paul Bremer's offensive against unions in the end of June. According to Informed Comment :

Sometimes you see a news report and it just looks odd, tipping you that something important is going on. Asharq al-Awsat has an item today that Paul Bremer, US Proconsul of Iraq, has dissolved the Pharmacists' Union and the Veterinarians' Union, writing letters to their presidents telling them they have no further authority because their organizations are no longer needed. The deputy head of the Arab Pharmacists' Union, Tahir al-Shakhshir, rejected the decree and said the American civil administration of Iraq had no authority to issue it because the union is an Arab League institution. The deputy head of the Arab Veterinarians' Union, As'ad Abu Raghib, expressed similar sentiments and said that the union might pick up and move to Amman, Jordan, to continue its work among Iraqi veterinarians. What is going on here? Is the notoriously anti-union philosophy of the US Republican party being imposed on Iraq? Or is this an assault on pan-Arabist, Arab League institutions, aimed at removing any possible source of opposition to the Americanization of Iraq? Or is this move part of de-Baathification? (If the latter, why not just remove the high officers of the unions? Or just make union membership voluntary?)

I don't like where this is going. Looks like the US wants to keep Iraqi labor at the status quo ante bellum - no right to organize, no right to strike, etc., like in the rest of the Arab states.

[MichaeltheGreat]

And if the Iraqi people don't like it, they can change it when we get the hell out and they get to self-govern.

[Ramo]

Assuming they'll have that choice after the occupation.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Well, once we're gone, it's up to them, one way or another.

[Ramo]

Well, it'll be up to someone anyways. 'Prolly whoever has the most guns.

[MikeH]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
And if the Iraqi people don't like it, they can change it when we get the hell out and they get to self-govern.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
And if the Iraqi people don't like it, they can change it when we get the hell out and they get to self-govern.

They are encouraging the Usians to leave quickly.

[MikeH]

I would put money on there still being US presence in Iraq in 10 years time.

[Urban Ranger]

How about Afghanistan?

[MikeH]

Probably, unless India and Pakistan go to war. The policy does seem to be to have long term bases in as many countries as possible.

[Ramo]

I don't think we'll be there for 10 years. We'll probably leave as soon (and no later) as it looks like Chalabi or some other pliant Iraqi has some semblance of control.

[MikeH]

Most of them will leave but there'll still be bases.

[Ramo]

Probably true.

[Sava]

Published on Wednesday, August 27, 2003 by the Globe and Mail/Canada
Bush's War Goes Global
The US President Has Created a Tool Kit for Any Mini-empire Looking to Get Rid of the Opposition

by Naomi Klein

The Marriott Hotel in Jakarta was still burning when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's Co-ordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, explained the implications of the day's attack.

"Those who criticize about human rights being breached must understand that all the bombing victims are more important than any human-rights issue."

In a sentence, we got the best summary yet of the philosophy underlying President George W. Bush's so-called war on terrorism. Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The specter of terrorism, real and exaggerated, has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human-rights abuses.

Many have argued that the WoTtm is the U.S. government's thinly veiled excuse for constructing a classic empire, in the model of Rome or Britain. Two years into the crusade, it's clear that this is a mistake: The Bush gang doesn't have the stick-to-it-ness to successfully occupy one country, let alone a dozen.

Mr. Bush and the gang do, however, have the hustle of good marketers, and they know how to contract out. What Mr. Bush has created in the war on terrorism is less a doctrine for world domination than an easy-to-assemble tool kit for any mini-empire looking to get rid of the opposition and expand its power.

The war on terrorism was never a war in the traditional sense, it lacked a clear target or a fixed location. It is, instead, a kind of brand, an idea that can be easily franchised by any government in the market for an all-purpose opposition cleanser.

We already know that the WoTtm works on domestic groups that use terrorist tactics, such as Hamas or the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC). That's only its most basic application. WoTtm can be used on any liberation or opposition movement. It can be applied liberally to unwanted immigrants, pesky human-rights activists and even on hard-to-get-out investigative journalists.

It was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who was the first to adopt Mr. Bush's franchise, parroting the White House's pledges to "pull up these wild plants by the root, smash their infrastructure" as he sent bulldozers into the occupied territories to uproot olive trees, and tanks to raze civilian homes.

Soon enough, Mr. Sharon's wild plants included human-rights observers who were bearing witness to the attacks, as well as aid workers and journalists.

Another franchise soon opened in Spain with Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar extending his WoTtm from the Basque guerrilla group ETA to the Basque separatist movement as a whole, the vast majority of which is peaceful. Mr. Aznar has resisted calls to negotiate with the Basque Autonomous Government and banned the political party Batasuna (even though, as The New York Times noted in June, "no direct link has been established between Batasuna and terrorist acts"). He has also shut down Basque human-rights groups, magazines and the only entirely Basque-language newspaper. In February, the Spanish police raided the Association of Basque Middle Schools, accusing it of having terrorist ties.

This appears to be the true message of Mr. Bush's war franchise: Why negotiate with your political opponents when you can annihilate them? In the era of WoTtm, little concerns like war crimes and human rights just don't register.

Among those who have taken careful note of the new rules is Georgia's President Eduard Shevardnadze. In October, while extraditing five Chechens to Russia (without due process) for its WoTtm, he stated that "international human-rights commitments might become pale in comparison with the importance of the anti-terrorist campaign."

Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri got the same memo. She came to power pledging to clean up the notoriously corrupt and brutal military and to bring peace to the fractious country. Instead she has called off talks with the Free Aceh Movement and in May, invaded the province, the largest military offensive since the 1975 invasion of East Timor. The Indonesian human-rights organization Tapol describes the situation in the oil-rich province as "a living hell, a daily roundup of trauma and extreme fear, of sweeping villages, of the seizure of people at random and, hours later, their bodies left lying by the roadside."

Why did the Indonesian government think it could get away with the invasion after the international outrage that forced it out of East Timor? Easy: Post-Sept. 11, the government cast Aceh's movement for national liberation as "terrorist," which means human-rights concerns no longer apply. Rizal Mallarangeng, a senior adviser to Megawati, called it the "blessing of Sept. 11."

Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo appears to feel similarly blessed. Quick to cast her battle against Islamic separatists in the southern Moro region as part of WoTtm, Ms. Arroyo -- like Mr. Sharon, Mr. Aznar and Megawati -- abandoned peace negotiations and waged brutal civil war instead, displacing 90,000 people last year.

She didn't stop there. Last August, speaking to soldiers at a military academy, Ms. Arroyo extended the war beyond terrorists and armed separatists to include "those who terrorize factories that provide jobs," code for trade unions. Labor groups in Philippine free-trade zones report that union organizers are facing increased threats, and strikes are being broken up with extreme police violence.

In Colombia, the government's war against leftist guerrillas has long been used as cover to murder anyone with leftist ties, whether union activists or indigenous farmers. But even in Colombia, things have gotten worse since President Alvaro Uribe took office in August, 2002, on a WoTtm platform.

Last year, 150 union activists were murdered. Like Mr. Sharon, Mr. Uribe quickly moved to get rid of the witnesses, expelling foreign observers and playing down the importance of human rights. Only after "terrorist networks are dismantled . . . will we see full compliance with human rights," Mr. Uribe said in March.

Sometimes WoTtm is not an excuse to wage a war, but to keep one going. Mexican President Vicente Fox came to power in 2000 pledging to settle the Zapatista conflict "in 15 minutes" and to tackle rampant human-rights abuses committed by the military and police. Now, post-Sept. 11, Mr. Fox has abandoned both projects. The Mexican government has made no moves to reinitiate the Zapatista peace process and last week, Mr. Fox closed down the high-profile office of the Undersecretary of Human Rights.

This is the era ushered in by Sept. 11, war and repression unleashed not by a single empire, but a global franchise of them. In Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Colombia, the Philippines and China, governments have latched onto to Mr. Bush's deadly WoTtm and are using it to erase their opponents and tighten their grip on power.

Last week, another war was in the news. In Argentina, the senate voted to repeal two laws that granted immunity to the sadistic criminals of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. At the time, the generals called their campaign of extermination a "war on terror," using a series of kidnappings and violent attacks by leftist groups as an excuse to seize power.

The vast majority of the 30,000 people who were disappeared during the dictatorship weren't terrorists; they were union leaders, artists, teachers, psychiatrists. As with all wars on terrorism, terrorism wasn't the target -- it was the excuse to wage the real war on people who dared to dissent.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0827-08.htm

Here's a related article. Many of our "allies" are using the War on Terror as an opprotunity to suppress peaceful labor unions.

[Ramo]

Stop jacking my thread. We've had plenty of others on labor in Colombia, Indonesia, etc. This is about Iraq.