1)
Now For Industrial Shock and Awe
2) In Iraq, Labor Protest
is a Crime – by
David Bacon
3)
International Labor Network Condemns Arrest of Iraqi Labor Leaders
4) Privatizing Iraq – by Line
Thomsen, Baghdad Bulletin
5) US 'corporate
invasion' brings no respite from war – by Justin Huggler and Seb
Walker in Baghdad
**********************
Workers
Online June 27, 2003
Now
For Industrial Shock and Awe
A
US law firm that prides itself on busting unions and breaking
pickets has been handed a key role in drafting labour laws for
post-Taliban Afghanistan.
General secretary of Union Network International Phillip Jennings
this week called on the International Labour Organisation to explain
how private lawyers had taken control of the legal process and to
ensure a similar process does not occur in Iraq.
The firm, Dechert, supplies one of the lead lawyesr to the
Afghanistan Transitional Commercial Law Project, which was initiated
by the Center for International Management Education and the American
Bar Association.
Dechert prides itself on its anti-union credentials, crowing on its
website that:
We help employers maintain a union-free environment, conduct
collective bargaining negotiations, secure injunctive relief from
strikes, boycotts, and mass picketing, and develop compliance
programs.
We regularly handle labor arbitrations and defend employers facing
unfair labor practice charges.
It also proudly cites its work representing Big Tobacco, overturning
a $145 punitive damages claim in a Florida case that puts at risk all
damages actions against tobacco companies.
Speaking to the ILO Conference in Geneva, Jennings also raised
concerns the World Bank was trying to promote investment in
Afghanistan by slashing the minimum wage by 10 percent.
"In both nations we want to see the emergence of a free and
independent trade union movement," he said.
Federal ALP IR spokesman Robert McClelland expressed concern that
Afghanistan and potentially Iraq might end up with labour laws that
fall short of international standards and contain no effective right
to organise and bargain collectively.
"Such rights have always been essential to enable working people
to
raise and maintain their living standards at dignified levels,"
McClelland says.
McClelland says Australia, as a long-standing member of the ILO,
should be seeking that the ILO plays a role in assisting these
nations, which are emerging from the trauma of war, to develop labour
laws that meet internationally agreed minimum standards.
He says it was a disgrace the Howard Government had all but ignored
the ILO for seven years, and would be raising the matter of
Afghanistan and Iraq with Workplace Relations Minister Tony Abbott
and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer through the Parliament.
######################
IN
IRAQ, LABOR PROTEST IS A CRIME
By DAVID
BACON
Iraq's legal code may be in disarray. The streets of Baghdad may be
filled with thieves and hijackers who seem to have little fear of
being arrested. But US occupation authorities seem to have no trouble
identifying one crime, at least. For the four million people out of
work in Iraq, protest is against the law.
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.
Their protest started when hundreds of unemployed workers gathered in
front of an old bank building on Abu Nawas Street.. From there they
marched to the office of the ruling occupation council. According to
Zehira Houfani, a member of the Iraq Solidarity Project in Canada, who
witnessed the protest, workers in similar demonstrations in the past
had normally dispersed at that point. Each time, however, Madi told
Houfani, "the representatives of the occupation forces meet and
discuss with us, promise to solve the problem, but each time their
promises are not fulfilled and we are forced to take to the streets
again."
On this occasion they decided to step up the pressure on US
authorities. In the time-honored tradition of workers from Mexico to
the Philippines, they set up a planton, or a tent encampment, outside
the council gates. US soldiers on guard ordered them to disperse, but
the workers refused. Night fell. Then, at one in the morning the
soldiers returned, arrested 21 protesters, and took them inside the
compound, where they were held until the following morning. One
arrested union member, 58-year old Ali Djaafri, told Houfani that the
experience was "very humiliating. At no other time during the
occupation," he said, "has my resentment towards the US
soldiers been that strong."
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.
Thousands more worked in former government-owned enterprises. Many of
those have been closed down, and occupation authorities have announced
their intention to privatize huge sections of the former economy.
That all adds up to thousands of working families facing an extreme
economic crisis. The new union for unemployed workers has become the
fastest-growing, largest labor organization in the country as a
result.
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.
Kacem Madi and other unemployed leaders led the sit-in protest over
this discrimination, and announced that they would continue their
demonstrations until they either received jobs or some kind of
unemployment payment. But occupation authorities, instead of trying to
address the problem, arrested them.
International labor organizations, including the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions (of which the AFL-CIO is a member)
have sharply criticized the desperate situation of Iraqi workers.
"Ensuring respect for workers' rights, including freedom of
association, must be central to building a democratic Iraq and to
ensuring sustainable economic and social development," the ICFTU
said in a statement made May 30. "Democracy must have roots. It
requires free elections, but also mass based, democratic trade unions
that help secure it and protect it as well as being schools of
democracy." Arab trade unionists are even more critical of the
occupation's effect on workers.
According to Hacene Djemam, General Secretary of the International
Confederation of Arab Trade Unions, "war makes privatization
easy: first you destroy the society and then you let the corporations
rebuild it." He emphasized that Iraqi workers must be able to
form unions of their own choosing.
Unfortunately, the corporations who have been granted contracts for
work in Iraq by the Bush administration have long records of fighting
unions and violating labor rights. In May, Amy Newell, national
coordinator of US Labor Against the War, and former executive
secretary of the Monterey/Santa Cruz Central Labor Council, went to
Geneva to present a report to international labor bodies, highlighting
the record of 18 of those corporations.
USLAW is a network of unions and other labor organizations opposed to
U.S. policy in Iraq. The organization charges that the U.S. government
pays for a bloated military budget with severe cuts in domestic social
programs. It grew out of the many demonstrations prior to the March 20
invasion, by which time unions representing almost one-third of all
organized workers in the U.S. were on record against the war. At that
time even the AFL-CIO itself publicly opposed the Bush
administration's Iraq policy.
Companies highlighted in the report made in Geneva include: -
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 Dick 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.)
"Prior to its suppression by the Hussein regime, Iraq enjoyed a
robust and broadly representative labor movement," the report
concludes. [The pre-Hussein government was overthrown in a 1956
cold-war coup organized by the Central Intelligence Agency - ed]
"Its legacy provides the seedbed for reestablishing an
independent labor movement with internationally recognized workers'
rights to organize, bargain and strike. However, the occupying powers
have invited into Iraq private corporations with an established record
of labor, environmental and human rights violations. These
corporations were chosen by the Bush administration, which itself is
considered by many as the most anti-worker, union-hostile
administration in modern U.S. history. This does not bode well for
respect of workers rights in Iraq."
If the arrest of Madi and the unemployed workers last month in Baghdad
is any indication, that concern is well deserved.
(David Bacon is a free-lance journalist and renowned labor activist
based in the San Francisco Bay Area.)
######################
International
Labor Network Condemns Arrest of Iraqi Labor Leaders
On Saturday, August 2, at 11:30
p.m., Baghdad local time, U.S. occupation forces arrested Qasim Hadi
and fifty-four other Iraqi leaders and members of the Union of the
Unemployed in Iraq who had been engaged in a five-day sit-in protest
of the treatment of unemployed Iraqi workers by occupation forces and
U.S. corporations granted contracts for work in Iraq. We are informed
that the detained workers were released only after the intervention of
representatives of the United Nations.
These were not armed combatants. They were not terrorists. These were
unemployed workers peacefully protesting, exercising their democratic
right to seek redress for their grievances.
U.S. Labor Against War joins with the International Liaison Committee
of Workers and Peoples and the International Confederation of Arab
Trade Unions to unequivocally condemn these arrests. The U.S. cannot
claim to be acting in the interests of the Iraqi people with the
objective of establishing a democratic government in Iraq while
violating internationally recognized labor and human rights of Iraqi
workers who seek to exercise their democratic rights to peacefully
protest and seek redress for their grievances.
The bedrock of any democracy is the right of dissent and the right to
seek redress for grievances against the ruling order. One of the
principal building blocks of a democratic government and society is
the existence and operation of an independent labor movement. Iraq is
signatory to more than fifty of the International Labor Organization
Conventions on labor rights, at the center of which is the right to
organize and to protest treatment and conditions. U.S. and other
occupation forces are obligated to respect and honor those
Conventions.
We call upon the U.S. and other occupation forces to immediately and
fully respect all of the rights guaranteed by the ILO Conventions.
Further, we call for the immediate withdrawal from Iraq of all U.S.,
British and other combatant forces. The U.S. and other Coalition
partners in the invasion of Iraq are morally and legally obligated
instead to provide whatever resources are required to meet that
country's humanitarian needs and for reconstruction and repair of
damages caused by their military actions.
In pursuit of these objectives, we have launched an International
Campaign for Iraqi Labor Rights. We are committed to support Iraqi
workers as they organize their own independent, democratic labor
movement free of interference by employers and all external interests.
Accordingly, we intend to send an international delegation of labor
leaders to Iraq to monitor the observance of labor rights there. Details
about this delegation will be forthcoming.
Privatizing
Iraq
by
Line Thomsen, Baghdad Bulletin
August 31st, 2003
(reprinted from Occupation Watch website)
Editor's note: BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast is also the author
of the recent bestseller "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," a
look at the American political process. He is also one of two
journalists who obtained a document from the administration of US
President George Bush titled "Moving the Iraqi Economy from
Recovery to Sustainable Growth," a confidential report of 101 pages
from inside the US State Department and written prior to the invasion of
Iraq. It outlines the plan for what it terms "the postconflict
economy" and involves the mass privatization of virtually every
Iraqi government asset.
He decided to grant an interview to the Bulletin because "you speak
to some people in Iraq, and they ought to know what is planned for
them."
Same old question: Was oil really the reason for war?
The leaked document, which only Palast and a reporter from The Wall
Street Journal have managed to obtain, contains plans of "private
sector involvement in strategic sectors, including privatization,
assets, sales, concessions, leases and management contracts --
especially in the oil and supporting industries."
"Said more plainly; it is a plan to sell off the oil fields, the
pipelines and the oil infrastructure of Iraq to private business and to
turn what is left of Iraq into a freemarket paradise," Palast said.
"The plan is obviously made to make it easier for the giant
operators that could possibly afford to take over Iraq's oil
wealth," he said.
Palast's suggestion to what organizations would possibly take over the
oil wealth included "two giant American operators, two British and
one Russian operation."
Needless to say, Palast's theory and the leaked document echoes the
European and Middle Eastern claim that the reason to start the war was
oil.
The document does not only indicate that US is planning to privatize
every economically beneficial asset, but also the very backbone of Iraq,
its laws.
"The plan contains details of how to rewrite Iraq's laws, including
the nation's copyright laws, the nation's business regulations laws,
taking over the banking sector and includes such strange things as
writing for Iraq its application to join the World Trade Organization.
On top of that, the plan includes a detailed rewriting of Iraq's tax
code," Palast said.
The plan in action
Quoting the plan, Palast reads: the US government will, through a
private contract: "Design fiscal regimes for petroleum, mining and
transit pipelines, for para-legislations, implementing regulations and
strategies for implementations and identify priorities of revenue tax
reform. Š If property tax regimes fit tax policy strategy; to provide
support for regulation and implementing instructions and procedures and
appropriate staffing and training of taxing personnel."
Interestingly, the document also outlines plans to use the World
Economic Forum, rather than the World Bank, which is designed for
postwar reconstruction. The World Economic Forum is a private
organization, controlled by multinational corporations with no
experience or authority to take over a nation's economy.
"By eliminating the World Bank, they indicate that there is no time
for the World Bank's indirect methods. The grab for the assets has to be
done before a government is elected, which would stop it -- any
government is going to want to maintain some Iraqi ownership over Iraqi
resources, which is not in the plan. It is a deliberate go-around around
the World Bank."
Though Palast himself is one of the most well-known critics of the World
Bank, he said that:
"Compared to Paul Bremer and the World Economic Forum, the World
Bank is a wonderful agency. That is how bad this is."
The document is said to contain a whole section on tax administrations
and how to eliminate all the trade laws of Iraq. From Palast's reading,
it appears that almost nowhere in this document does the one key
element, Iraqis, appear.
"There are only a couple of places where the document states that
they will "include members of an Iraqi government in the decision
making."
Is this why Garner was sent home?
From reading the document, Palast said he is confident he knows why Gen.
Jay Garner, the former head of the US-led administration in Iraq, was
removed in May.
"Jay Garner was savaged and he was defamed, by a terrible whisper
campaign that he was incompetent Š because he got off the airplane and
said that there would be elections within 90 days. Also he said that no
elected government of Iraq, no matter what religion, political viewpoint
or philosophy would ever sell off its oilfields. That is why he got sent
out."
"Making such statements could only mean that Garner was not aware
of the US plan," Palast said.
Palast continues to gather evidence that Bremer knows the plan very well
and is implementing it. He has already let out contracts for
reorganizing the Iraqi banking industry and convened a special meeting
with the World Economic Forum.
"What for?," asked Palast rhetorically. "They are putting
the plan into direct action".
The war was long planned
Among the other disturbing facts of the document obtained by Greg Palast
is the date it was constructed. According to Palast, the document
appears to have been written long before the war.
"The draft I have obtained is dated February 2003, but given the
extreme, extraordinary detail of what it discusses, it is clear that
this plan was written months, maybe even a year, before the invasion.
Certainly it was written well before we had any idea that there would be
a conflict in Iraq. This makes it obvious that the US administration was
thinking of a war with Iraq long before Saddam Hussein was publicly
declared a threat to America," Palast said.
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######################
US
'corporate invasion' brings no respite from war
By
Justin Huggler and Seb Walker in Baghdad
05
September 2003
Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad yesterday. Not to a skyline bristling
with cranes but to a city where there is still no electricity for much
of the day because less power is being generated than under Saddam
Hussein.
Almost five months after the overthrow of Saddam, entire neighbourhoods
are still without phone lines. The government offices bombed in the war
are still blackened shells. Next to them stand the burnt-out ruins of
ministries and shopping centers set on fire in the looting that
followed.
But the US Defence Secretary was unlikely to see those, cocooned in
security to keep him from the seething anger against the American
occupation. Much of Baghdad is still an armed American camp. The
country's infrastructure is in a worse state than it was under Saddam.
One of the accusations levelled at the US invasion was that it was
simply paving the way for a subsequent American corporate invasion. But
despite billions of dollars of contracts won by American companies,
there are no visible signs of reconstruction at all.
Foreign businessmen are too afraid to visit Iraq for fear of being
kidnapped. Those who have ventured in report being threatened at
gunpoint by Iraqis. New Iraqi ministers have finally been appointed -
but the all-important Oil Minister, Ibrahim Mohammed Bahr al-Ulum, is
not even in Iraq. He is holed up in Kuwait.
The oil industry - Iraq's only big export sector - is producing less oil
than it did under Saddam immediately before the war. Production is
around 1.7 million barrels a day, compared with 3 million a day before
the war. Paul Bremer, the US civilian administrator, does not expect to
get oil production back to pre-war levels before October next year.
Desperate to find someone else to pay the bills, the US is trying to get
foreign countries to put up some cash towards the $100bn (£63bn) that
it estimates will be needed. But as long as America insists on keeping
control of Iraq and not handing the running of the country over to the
UN, foreign donors are reluctant. A pledging conference scheduled for
Madrid next month is now in doubt. The US government is preparing to ask
Congress for an extra $2.75bn for Iraq.
Iraqi businessmen gather every Thursday morning at the convention centre
taken over by the American occupation authority, where KBR (formerly
Kellogg Brown and Root), a subsidiary of Halliburton and one of the US
contractors for reconstructing Iraq, hands out tenders to local firms.
As Doris Carter announces the tenders for this week, hands shoot up in
the air. "We need two tractors with 40-foot trailers and an
operator for two months," yells Ms Carter. There is a scramble for
application forms.
Outside the auditorium, the Iraqi businessmen sit gloomily drinking
coffee. "We left early," explains a representative from a
company that sells heavy equipment to the oil industry. "We could
send our tea-boy to the local market to get contracts of the type they
are awarding today. Everybody should stop going to these meetings as a
protest against what is happening."
Many of the businessmen have similar complaints, but none wants his name
printed for fear of jeopardising future contracts. "From the
tenders which I've seen, it's nothing," says a company
representative. "We can handle road-building and construction -
they ask us for office supplies. Big contracts are available, it's just
that we're not getting them. Some big tenders are awarded that we do not
hear about. We just fill in a lot of forms, and then sit and wait."
Halliburton, the American corporation formerly headed by the US
Vice-President, Dick Cheney, started out servicing Texas oil wells. It
won contracts worth more than $1.7bn in Iraq without ever having to go
through a bidding process.
It did it by virtue of a catch-all contract to provide logistical
support for the US army agreed in 2001. That contract was only supposed
to cover work directly connected with military operations - but the army
broadened the definition to include work on Iraqi oilfields, claiming
contingency measures to put out oil fires were part of secret military
planning. Halliburton's contracts are now expected to be worth a lot
more than previously thought.
Then there is Bechtel. The former Republican secretary of state from the
Reagan era, George Schultz, is a Bechtel board member. As chairman of
the so-called Committee to Liberate Iraq, Mr Schultz was one of the
biggest campaigners for war. Bechtel was awarded the primary contract -
worth as much as $680m (£415m) andpotentially much more lucrative - to
rebuild Iraq's water and electricity supplies, roads, schools, sewers
and hospitals. Bechtel was chosen in a closed-door process, with just
six companies, all American, invited to put in bids.
According to sources in Washington, Bechtel has made $1.3m in political
donations over the past four years, 60 per cent to Republicans.
Bechtel's contract is for work on many sectors, but most crucially
electrical power, which Mr Bremer has called "the key to
reconstruction". Four months after the war supposedly ended, Iraq's
power stations are producing less electricity than before the war:
currently only about 3,300 megawatts a day, compared with 4,000 before
the war, according to Mr Bremer's own figures. Current demand of 7,000mw
would have to be met to keep the lights on 24 hours a day. In one street
in Baghdad's Adhamia district, residents have become so frustrated with
constant black-outs that they have come up with their own solution. The
two sides of the street are on different local grids, so the residents
have stretched power cables across the street and take electricity from
their neighbours when the power goes out on their side.
And yet Bechtel is now to get an extra $350m on top of the $680m
contract it originally won. The new money is "to maintain momentum
in high-priority infrastructure projects", according to a funding
document from the US-led Iraqi provisional authority.
That is despite a commitment from the US Agency for International
Development (USAid), a government agency handing out massive contracts
for reconstructing Iraq, that Bechtel would get no more American
taxpayers' money. A USAid spokesman said "security conditions"
had prompted Mr Bremer to change his mind.
Getting a phone line to anywhere in the country except Baghdad is all
but impossible. A mobile phone operating licence has still not been
awarded - though the Americans ordered Arab companies who had started a
service to close down in July so the contract could be properly bid for.
So what is going wrong with Iraqi reconstruction? Ask Bechtel and their
spokesman, Francis Canavan, says it's a combination of the looting and
antiquated infrastructure neglected under 13 years of international
sanctions. Iraq's power generators were run dangerously, without proper
maintenance, under Saddam, he says, and Bechtel is now running them at
safe levels while the damage from bombing and looting is repaired.
And without electricity to pump and purify the water system, clean water
supplies remain below pre-war levels.
The absence of security in Iraq is proving a problem. A conference on
mobile phones in July had to be held in Jordan because foreign
businessmen were too afraid to visit Iraq. There have been at least 40
kidnappings for ransom in three months. It is rich Iraqis who have been
kidnapped so far, but some of those released had been tortured, and the
kidnappers threatened to kill them if the families did not pay.
Security has also been a problem at Umm Qasr, Iraq's only officially
functioning port. "Nothing is normal, I can tell you that,"
said Fergus Moran of Stevedoring Services of America, the company
contracted to get the port running again. "The security situation
in the country has not improved." He said foreign employees of the
company had been threatened.
Another source at SSA said Iraqis had threatened foreign employees with
hand grenades inside the port. Thieves are also breaking into warehouses
at the port several times a week, by blowing holes in the warehouse
walls, he said.
But Mr Moran said security was not the only problem. Funds under the
company's contract with USAid are slow coming too. "I think most
contractors around Iraq will tell you that the funds are slow in
coming," Mr Moran said. "And ours is not a very big
contract." Every indication is that America has vastly
underestimated the scale of the task it faces in reconstructing Iraq.
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