Materials on Iraqi Workers Rights

US Labor Against the War (USLAW)
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/

Organized at a Chicago meeting in Jan. 2002. Anti-war petition “signed by more than 200
labor federations and unions in 53 countries, collectively representing more than 130 million members.”

Click to access uslaw_report_indesign_2.pdf

In June 2003 joined international labor conference in Geneva, held simulatenously with annual meeting of the UN International Labor Organization (ILO). Amy Newell of USLAW releases report on, ” eighteen US corporations granted no-bid contracts in Iraq worth billions of dollars” [see pdf above].

In October 2003, USLAW sent two delegates, “Clarence Thomas, Executive Board Member of the International Longshore & Warehouse Workers (ILWU) Local 10, and David Bacon, independent labor journalist and photographer,” along with ILC, French teachers’ union, and Iraqi trade union exile from France, on a six-day mission to Iraq [pdf above].

“They discovered widespread, massive violations of workers ‘ basic rights, 70% unemployment with no social safety net, human rights abuses, increasing control by U.S.corporations of the most basic elements of the Iraqi economy, and shockingly, CPA enforcement of a Saddam Hussein-era
law that bars public sector workers and those employed by public enterprises from joining or being represented by unions” [pdf above].

“Every day,” writes David Bacon in the opening paragraph of his report, ” the economic policies of the occupying authorities create more hunger among Iraq’s working people, transforming them
into a pool of low-wage, semi-employed labor, desperate for jobs at almost any price” [pdf above].

In October of 2003, USLAW convenes National Labor Assembly for Peace which in turn resolves to launch the Campaign to End the Occupation and for Labor Rights in Iraq [pdf above].

International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples (ILC)

International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions (ICATU)

also see: laborstart.org

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