May Day appeal for solidarity: Iraq's workers need trade unions too

Submitted by Anon on 1 May, 2003 - 11:04

By Cathy Nugent

Under the barbaric dictatorship of Saddam Hussein the workers of Iraq were afraid to speak, to organise, and certainly to strike.

For the regime, the workers existed only to labour. Their labour financed Saddam and his brutal clique in their life of obscene luxury. Even during the period of sanctions, when the UN and Saddam Hussein combined to starve Iraq's people, the workers laboured to build grotesque monuments to the glory of their oppressor.

Saddam's regime has gone, but what kind of government are the US invaders installing in its place?
A government friendly to the capitalists of the world! A government that will oversee an oil bonanza for the global energy industry. As they were for Saddam, most valuable to the capitalists will be the oil workers who drill for liquid gold.

Who will their new masters be? The oil companies who have caused hundreds of deaths and injuries to their workers, and to people living on the land where they drill. Gigantic corporations who are hostile - no doubt less savage than Saddam's regime, but hostile nonetheless -to workers' organisation.

The workers of Iraq will be forced to defend themselves against their new exploiters. They will build trade unions.

The Iraqi working class has a long history of organisation, in trade unions and political parties, but one that has been crushed for 40 years. It will take time to rebuild a workers' movement, but new unions will emerge and they will need our solidarity.

The workers of Iraq need trade unions not only to fight on bread and butter issues such as wages and conditions. The workers of Iraq need their own organisations in order to discuss and assert working-class answers to all the political questions facing Iraqi society. Democratic questions about who rules? How can the remnants of the old regime be brought to justice? How can women defend and extend their rights?

We do not yet know who will build these organisations. But there are individuals and organisations who will play a part in shaping the future.

The Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), from the revolution of 1958 to the first Ba'ath coup of 1963, was a powerful mass party. Sociologicallyin its composition, and in the political aspirations of its members, it was a workers' party. Politically, a fatally flawed party, Stalinist.

It was brutally crushed by the Ba'athists in 1963. Later, in the 1970s, it participated in the Ba'athist government, waging war against the Kurds, only to fall out with Saddam, and be repressed again. But there are individuals alive who remember and associate with the ICP.

In recent times, the party opposed simultaneously the US/UK and the Saddam Hussein regime during the war. It refuses to take part in the political horseplay being orchestrated by the US interim administration.

In future, the youth of Iraq might look to the ICP, and it might well find itself involved in trade union work.

The Worker-communist Party of Iraq, which has recently opened offices in Baghdad, Nasiriyah and Kirkuk, is another group with plans to organise in post-war/post-Saddam Iraq [see centre pages for interview].

May Day is the day when workers of the world unite. Our message to workers and socialists in Iraq on May Day is this: whenever the workers' movement in Iraq reconstitutes itself, we will be ready to support your initiatives, to help you exploit opportunities, and we will do this in the spirit of openness, of non-sectarian solidarity.

Whatever the future holds, international working class solidarity, from socialists but crucially from other trade unionists, will be vital. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions has vowed to assist Iraqi workers. This is a bureaucratic body, but it has power, and can organise spectacular action.

Millions of European workers, organised by their unions, protested against the war before it began. The commitment they showed to the people of Iraq then, they can continue to show.

During the coming weeks, Solidarity, together with No Sweat, will be putting together a campaign in solidarity with Iraqi workers that we can take into the labour movement, into our workplaces and into student unions.

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