More than 10,000 people marched along Market Street in San Francisco June 5 in the first of a new series of demonstrations against the Bush administration’s policies of war and occupation. As the election draws closer, even larger protests are planned.
Union members were prominent among the marchers, many mobilized by U.S. Labor Against the War. Since January, USLAW, a network that now includes dozens of union locals and labor councils nationally, has been mounting a campaign for labor rights in Iraq. The organization has brought reports, videos and testimony of American unionists who have traveled to Iraq (among them ILWU longshore Local 10 executive board member Clarence Thomas) into union halls in California, Washington, Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and beyond. As a result, thousands of union members now see Iraq not just as a scene of violent conflict, but as a complex nation of 24 million people, with trade unions, political parties and civil organizations trying desperately to win back control of their country.
USLAW’s campaign highlights connections between the war abroad and Bush’s war on labor at home, through common policies such as a ban on union organizing (enforced within the Department of Homeland Security) and privatization.
USLAW is unmasking the occupation’s economic agenda, the hallmarks of which are privatizing Iraq’s state-owned factories and workplaces (still the employer of most Iraqi workers); enforcing salaries that begin at $40 a month to attract investment from foreign corporations; and imposing a 1987 decree banning unions in state-owned plants, while prohibiting advocacy leading to “civil disorder.” In December coalition troops arrested leaders of the Iraqi Federation of Workers’ Trade Unions and the Union of the Unemployed (affiliated to the Federation of Workers Council and Unions of Iraq). Troops even threw the IFTU out of its Baghdad offices.
“If this is what the occupation means, I can understand why Iraqi unions don’t want it,” a worker at one meeting remarked.
U.S. unionists have responded and the USLAW campaign for solidarity with Iraqi labor has raised $10,000, giving half to each of the two federations.
Some in the labor movement argue that unions will lose the November election if they talk about the war, but USLAW contends labor can’t duck this fight. National security has been the justification for every Bush anti-labor attack, and it is the bedrock of his campaign. If the response across the country is any indication, unions increasingly see their own interest in opposing Bush both at home and in Iraq.
To contribute to the solidarity fund, or find out more information about labor in Iraq, go to the USLAW website: www.uslaboragainstwar.org —David Bacon
