David Bacon: First-Hand View of Iraq

Photojournalist and long-time trade unionist David Bacon has traveled twice to Iraq since 2003 to meet with Iraqi union leaders. Photos from those visits now are on display at the AFL-CIO building in Washington, D.C., where we held a book-signing event Thursday for the publication of Hadi Never Died: Hadi Saleh and the Iraqi Trade Unions. The book documents the life of Hadi Saleh, a prominent Iraqi union leader who was brutally tortured and murdered in January 2005, and Bacon offers these reflections on Saleh and the conditions facing unionists in Iraq.

For most Americans, it’s news that Iraq has unions, and of course, they’ve had to go through very tough times to survive. But from the  beginning of its oil industry in the 1920s, Iraq has had a vibrant, democratic and progressive social movement, which has included its labor movement. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Iraq had national health care, free higher education, extensive housing programs, and other achievements that we, in this country, are still trying to win.

It was a real learning experience for me to travel to Iraq the first time, meet its unionists, and learn a little of that history. I met Hadi Saleh in Baghdad, and was impressed by his courage and dedication, like that of all the people working to reorganize the country’s unions. On my second trip, to Basra, I had the chance to interview one of that movement’s heroes, Muhsin Mull Ali, a longshore union organizer now in his 70s, who went to prison twice for building unions on the docks. As a former organizer myself, I could only admire the courage and organizing skill of Iraqi unionists like Hadi Saleh and Muhsin Mull Ali, who organized and survived under such difficult conditions.

As someone who’s belonged my whole life to unions with basic resources like phones, fax machines, computers, even desks, it was even more impressive to me to see unions organizing in the face of occupation and a hostile insurgency, without any of those things.

Hadi Salih was killed because of his commitment and dedication to that vision of Iraq as a democratic and progressive country, a society in which its people lead secure lives, with full employment at a decent standard of living. Salih was probably murdered by elements of the old Saddam Hussein secret police, seeking to terrorize Iraq’s labor movement to keep it from gaining political power in the interest of its working people. But this didn’t mean Iraqi unions support the occupation. Every unionist I spoke with emphasized that the occupation has to end, and Iraqis have to take charge of their own country. That may not be an easy process for them, but it is the only way forward they see.

Just as we are resisting the privatization of public services in the United States, I learned that Iraqi unionists are involved in the same struggle. They have fought the Bush administration effort to force the selloff of hospitals, electric power stations, factories, ports and other resources. Oil workers in the south told me that preventing the privatization of oil was their most important goal, since the oil income will be indispensable to rebuilding their country. They asked for our help.

Coming back to the United States, I had the opportunity to work with locals of the United Steel Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Los Angeles, who sought to build union-to-union, worker-to-worker relationships with their counterparts in Iraq. We showed our photodocumentary project about oil and port workers in their union halls. They raised money and bought laptop computers, which they gave to their Iraqi co-workers when they came to this nation. Although it’s a dangerous place to visit now, I know members of these unions want to eventually visit Iraq and get to know the real conditions under which people work and organize there.

The war has had a tremendous impact on the working people of both countries.  We are connected to each other, and need to find ways in which we can use that connection to help each other achieve our shared vision of a just world.  Ending that war is part of that
vision, and a first step, but there is much more we can and will do for years to come.

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