IRAQ - The Labour Movement.

Iraq has a long history in labour militancy. Union activists, banned and jailed under the British and the Hashemite monarchy, organised a labour movement which was the admiration of the Arab world when Iraq became independent after the revolution of 1958. When Saddam came to power, however, he drove its leaders underground, killing or imprisoning the ones he could catch. When Saddam fell, Iraqi unionists came out of prison, up from underground and back from exile, determined to rebuild the labour movement. They did miraculously in the midst of war and bombings.

The oil workers union in the south is one of the largest in Iraq, with thousands of members on the rigs, pipelines and refineries. The electrical workers union is the first labour organisation headed by a woman, Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein. Together with other unions in railroads, hotels, ports, schools and factories, they have gone on strike, held elections, won wage increases and made democracy a living reality.

Yet the government has outlawed collective bargaining, enforcing a decree originally issued in 1987 by Saddam banning unions in the public sector. The Maliki government has seized all union funds and turned its back on a wave of assassinations of union leaders. After the June strike, Oil Minister Shahristani ordered industry officials to refuse to recognise or bargain with the oil worker unions.

Iraq's petroleum industry was nationalised in 1972, like that of every other country in the Middle East. The Iraqi oil union became, and remains, the industry's most zealous guardian. When Halliburton Corp. moved to Iraq in the wake of US troops in 2003, the company tried to control wells and rigs, withholding reconstruction aid to force workers to submit. The oil union struck for three days in August 2003, stopping exports and cutting off state income. Halliburton then closed its Basra offices and left the oil region. The oil and port unions compelled other foreign corporations to give up agreements under which the US occupation granted them control of Iraq's deep-water ports.

Ms Muhsin's electrical union is still battling to stop sub-contracting in the power sector, which it sees as a prelude to corporate takeover of a public resource. The labour movement in the petroleum sector is trying to emulate her union.

Nationalists - influenced by anti-West sentiment strong since the 1960s - accuse the US-led occupation of trying to privatise the Iraqi economy. Paul Bremer, formerly head of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority which ruled Iraq until June 2004, published lists in Baghdad newspapers of public enterprises he intended to auction off.

Arab labour leader Hacene Djemam has bitterly observed: "War makes privatisation easy: First you destroy society, then you let the corporations rebuild it". Hassan Jum'a Awad, president of the oil workers federation, on May 13 wrote a letter to the US Congress, saying: "Everyone knows the oil law doesn't serve the Iraqi people". He said the proposed law "serves Bush, his supporters and foreign companies at the expense of the Iraqi people. ...The USA claimed that it came here as a liberator, not to control our resources".

The unions have vowed to strike if the law is implemented. At the occupation's end, the government in Baghdad will need control of the petroleum wealth to rebuild a devastated country. Unionists say that gives Iraqis a big reason to fight to protect public ownership and control of the petroleum industry.

The KRG sees all this as a very negative development. The Kurds insist they must give IOCs proper incentives, including generous PSAs, to lure badly needed capital and technology to their region. They view the resource nationalism of Iraqis as a most serious threat to socio-economic development which the society needs after decades of devastation.