Five trade unionists from Britain visited Baghdad in October, facilitated by the Stop the War Coalition. Alex Gordon of the RMT National Executive told the Socialist Resistance forum about this, and what trade unionists in Britain should do in response.
t's significant how quickly national
unions have been able to coordinate a
first pathfinder delegation - with all the limitations that I shall explain. Within six months of the end of the war, and because of the successful campaign within the unions for a clear anti-war position -we managed to get an official delegation going across.
It would have been pretty unthinkable to get an official trade union delegation to Argentina in the post-Falkland situation.
The delegation was made up of myself from the RMT executive, a member of the FBU executive, a member of the Transport Salaried Staff Association (another railway union) and two members of the NUJ who had been sponsored by their branches.
The visit was quite short. We spent about three days in Baghdad. It was arranged through the Workers Democratic Trade Union Movement of Iraq, an exile -based trade union movement linked with the Iraqi Communist Party (which people will know has joined the American puppet government in Iraq).
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1109 London N4 2UU More info? contact: 020 8800 7460 They are operating under immensely difficult conditions, in the aftermath of war, where the infrastructure of the country has been almost destroyed -despite alt the propaganda on western television about 'smart bombs'. ••• understand the health warnings. I am trying to be objective about what we saw, what we were allowed to see.
In that very limited period of time, we went to about 12 workplaces, trade union meetings, meetings at the university with students, with academics. There were several political meetings. It was a busy schedule.
My impression was that the comrades of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, the emerging Iraqi trade union movement who we were meeting, did not restrain us in any
List Outlook way.
We were not restrained in the workplace visits we undertook. We specifically requested to go to the oil refinery; we were taken there. And we were not constrained about who we spoke to. Weregthe last 35 years there were going to be spoke to the new trade union committees that are starting to emerge. We spoke to ordinary workers who are not part of the committees.
The translations we were getting were pretty immediate. It was not someone saying five minutes after "well the gist of what he has just said to you is". It was sentence by sentence. I felt I was getting a pretty accurate picture of the small number of people we met in the amount of time we had, in the lraqi working class movement.
They are operating under immensely difficult conditions, in the aftermath of war, where the infrastructure of the country has been almost destroyed - despite all the propaganda on western television about "smart bombs.
The Iraqi. Federation of Trade Unions fell on April 9. A conference was called on May 17 in Baghdad, attended by 380 trade unionists. Some of them had returned from exile after April 9, some had been underground in clandestine conditions under the Baathist regime.
They did not call themselves a trade union federation straight away. They formed a preparatory committee, published a statement of trade union foundation and called on union members to go
5557 into the work places and organise trade union committees.
They set clear criteria as to how those committees should be formed. They emphasised to us that for the first time in elections at workplaces in Iraq. They held mass meetings at which all positions were elected.
The Federation itself is independent of any political party. There are, however, within it members of the Iraqi Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Movement. There is also, interestingly enough, one official who I believe is a member of the Iraqi National Accord (the political party of Alawi, the president of the puppet government and which is backed by the CIA).
I'll just give you some brief impressions of the workplaces we went to. The bicycle factory in Baghdad had been on strike on September 27 for 24 hours over wages. They succeeded in getting their wages increased from 17,000 Iraqi Dinar to 60,000 Iraqi Dinar a month.
That's about £30 a month: it's still peanuts, but it was a substantial increase.
During the strike there were solidarity delegations organised by the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions from seven factories across Baghdad, who marched to the factory to support the strikers.
Their working conditions are pretty difficult. The machinery is pretty old and out of date. There are a high percentage of women workers in the factory. There are
also disabled workers who are kept in the
production process in order to make up for
the absence of a decent social security system in Iraq.
I was particularly interested in the railway workshops we visited. There had
been a mass meeting a few weeks previously when the American coalition authority representatives had turned up at the
workshop to meet with representatives of
the former Baathist yellow unions.
The workers - 600 of them, train drivers, fitters, mechanics - held a mass meeting and elected three representatives who
they sent in to meet the Americans and tell
them they weren't prepared to be represented by former Baathists.
There was a confrontation, and the
American troops pulled guns on them.
They stood their ground. But the end result was that they are the de facto trade union representatives, and the former General Federation of Trade unions has been derecognised.
There is a high level of militancy. Strikes have proved that. There have been other strikes and demonstrations that I haven't talked about. There is de facto recognition on the shop floor, with a rather weak management structure that doesn't have any real decision-making power over how resources are used. Everything is vetoed by the occupation authority.
The formal legislative recognition of trade unions is entirely absent.
The 1987 labour law brought in by the Baathists banned trade unions in the private sector completely. It made one union, the General Federation of trade unions, compulsory for the large workforce in the state sector.
That union was used to extort money from workers. It was an instrument of vio lence against workers who tried to organise industrial action.
There are theories that the Americans are trying to promote friendly unions. That is not my view. Two billion dollars of assets in the name of the General Federation of Trade Unions is sitting in frozen bank accounts.
Trade unionists who are forming free democratic elected trade union committees are asking to get their hands on this so that they can develop a trade union struc ture. And the Americans are not assisting them in any way at all.
In my view it is important to try to build direct links between genuine democratic independent trade union committees and British trade unions that have an anti-war position. We should seek to develop that over the next twelve months.
May 1 next year is going to be the first May Day demonstration in Iraq since the early 1970s. This trade union movement put a million people on the streets of Baghdad on Mayday 1959. It will be important to see if we can deliver solidarity between then and now to support the emerging Iraqi independent democratic trade unjons on May 1,2004.
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