by James Parks, Dec 14, 2006

Abdullah Muhsin talks about the deaths of Iraqi union leaders during a reception at the AFL-CIO.

Twice this week, the headlines screamed out the gruesome statistics: “Bomb At Bus Stop Kills 11 in Baghdad”; “Suicide Bombing Attacks Leave 76 Dead, 200 Injured.” Most of these victims are innocent workers and their families going about their daily tasks or seeking work in a country where unemployment ranges between 60 percent and 70 percent in some places.

Every day, thousands of workers desperate for jobs risk their lives in war-torn Iraq to feed their families and eke out a living. Abdullah Muhsin, the international representative of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW), says workers are caught in the crossfire between the insurgents and the Iraqi and U.S. soldiers. Iraq’s workers and the union movement are under attack by forces sowing chaos in the country. Says Muhsin:

People are lining up to go to work, and a crazy suicide bomber comes into the crowd, and they all die. These people are not supporting any cause, any religion, any political agenda. They’re just trying to make a living.

Muhsin says many people are afraid to go out of their homes for fear of being killed, but they have no choice. They must go out and find work or go to the market.

Muhsin and Alan Johnson are co-authors of Hadi Never Died: Hadi Saleh and the Iraqi Trade Unions, a book about the life of Hadi Saleh, a prominent Iraqi union leader who was brutally tortured and murdered in January 2005 by enemies of democracy in Iraq.

In commemoration of International Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, the AFL-CIO and the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center hosted a book signing and reception to highlight the lack of labor law and protection for workers in Iraq. The event included an exhibit of David Bacon’s photographs exposing the plight of workers in Iraq. Muhsin and Johnson also attended the AFL-CIO Organizing Summit last Friday.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad reported that as many as 654,965 Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003.

While there’s disagreement on the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group’s report, the bipartisan study confirmed the situation in Iraq is “grave and deteriorating,” with civilians being killed daily and electricity, water and other basic infrastructure lacking. 

The Los Angeles Times described the situation as desperate. In an article about the car bomb that killed 76 Tuesday, the Times said:

Workers at Tayaran, also known as Aviation Square, are poor and mostly Shiites. Some are professionals, college graduates who lost their jobs and businesses as Iraq’s economy faltered over the last three years. Others are craftsmen unable to find steady work.

They stand in the square, at the intersection of Nidhal Street and the busy road leading to the city center, in front of the stores that rent dirt compactors, cement mixers and other construction equipment.

One day last week, the crowd included a father caring for his sick daughter, a youth trying to provide for his elderly parents and a would-be groom who wanted to be able to furnish an apartment for his bride.

In a statement last month, the GFIW condemned insurgents who target workers:

As all of us know, the occupation has destroyed everything in Iraqi society, unleashed the sectarian and nationalist gangs to slaughter and jeopardize peoples’ safety. These groups have failed miserably to instigate people (primarily workers) to fight each other; therefore, they change tactics to target the workers in their workplaces and living neighborhoods, kidnapping women, raping and throwing them dead in abandoned areas as a sectarian revenge to add more fuel to the fire.

They seek breaking the unity of the workers by calling for sectarian federalism, and defining them based on their ethnic background and religious belief.

At the same time, dozens of trade union leaders, scholars and journalists have been assassinated, and thousands more workers have been killed by extremists since the war began in 2003.

In an ironic twist, the terrorism that threatens workers’ lives may also be exacerbated by the lack of jobs. According to The Los Angeles Times article:

Riyad Hasan, manager of employment and vocational training at the Labor Ministry, said the government recognized that unemployment was increasing as violence escalated, and that it might be feeding the sectarian conflict.

“On a daily basis, we witness that most of the shops are being closed and shut due to the security situation,” he said. “It’s getting worse.”

If the economy doesn’t improve soon, Hassan Jabbar (an unemployed Iraqi worker) said he and other workers will go to work for insurgents, tipping the balance further toward chaos.

“The government asks citizens to help stop terrorism, and yet they have failed so far in providing for us. You can’t blame people participating in terrorist activities if it provides them with steady income,” Jabbar said, and workers drinking tea with him at Tayaran Square last week agreed. “The only thing preventing us from participating in similar activities is our conscience.”

The need for jobs is so dire The Washington Post reported yesterday that a small Pentagon task force is trying to revive nearly 200 state-owned factories closed down after the 2003 invasion. Their goal is to employ tens of thousands of Iraqis and possibly lessen the violence. Previously, these state owned enterprises were considered an anachronism by the U.S.-led occupation and slated for privatization, a move that Iraq’s trade unions strongly opposed.

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