Bastards. Gah, utter bastards. Nathan I hope you don't mind but I thought this post merited quoting Jon Langford in full:

Plenty tough and union made

from the country to the town
police and bosses held us down
back at the start when the ground was laid
plenty tough and union made

i don't think the king woke up one morning
said all people should be better paid (no!)
things were bad but things got changed
plenty tough and union made

plenty tough and union made
one long struggle day by day
that's how we got to live this way
plenty tough and union made

risked a lot to live like humans
locked out, beaten and defamed
no one said it was gonna be easy
plenty tough and union made

cowards cringe and traitors sneer
like the class war never happened here
but don't forget as the future fades
plenty tough and union made

our rewards are not in heaven
weak apart and strong together
divided we fall, united we stand
working woman and working man
we're not waiting for judgement day

Being a believer in fact-checking, I searched Google News for this story and came up empty. How confident are you of your source, Nathan?

Right. Because the mainstream media has been so good up to now covering the labor situation in Iraq.

Here's another story about Iraqi workers which failed to garner any coverage.

I think the Bacon piece is critical in that it points out the fact that the U.S. has retained Saddam-era anti-union laws. U.S. Labor Against War's site has more information on the trip Bacon took to Iraq with other U.S. workers.

The question I have is whether there is a difference between the Iraqi Federation of Workers Trade Unions and the General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq.

The question I have is whether there is a difference between the Iraqi Federation of Workers Trade Unions and the General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq.

My completely and utterly underinformed instinct is to say that it's a translation choice.

After that, it sounds like the union-splitting that went on in the early postwar era in order to establish an anticommunist international union federation via the AFL and ILO. Could be something similar, but then if all organizing is banned such distinctions make little sense.

I did a little more digging and what I've found is that the IFTU is a new post-Saddam formation that is a real attempt to re-build trade unionism in Iraq. The GFTU was set up in 1987 when Saddam basically banned real unions. The GFTU, according to the Worker Communist Party of Iraq is now the realm of former Ba'athists.

I think they are two different federations, to judge from this by a woman working for Occupation Watch (not remotely a mainstream source, but invaluable on-the-ground reports). Sounds to me as if IFTU is affiliated with the Workers Communist Party of Iraq. Yanar Mohammed, with the Party, is the feistiest feminist in the country.

The old General Federation of Iraqi Workers, formerly led by Ali Hassan Majid – chemical Ali – is still active and supported by the CPA, trying to pressurize new unions to join up by promising them state salaries and perks (social housing, food subsidies, bonuses) as paid by the old regime, and by the new one too, so says Hussein Fadhil Hasan, Chairman of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions in Basrah. "We sent letters to the CPA many times, informing them of the Baathist mangers and union representatives but they did nothing', he says speaking out of the tired offices of the old Baathist Union offices, now the HQ of the Communist Party, Women's Union, and Federation, and home to 70 displaced families

worth reading the whole thing

While I'm posting... Nathan, I'd love to get your reaction to a recent Juan Cole post on labor laws in Iraq. He takes the right position, but in such a lame, elite liberal way --- as if labor rights were something essential only for other countries' democracy. And the man lives and works in Michigan! Sorry, at the moment don't have a link; go to juancole.com and scroll down, or search for "working-class" ...

And the man lives and works in Michigan!

Yes, Nell, but he lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As we all know (or at least those of us who are Ohio State alums), Ann Arbor is a bastion of badness. :-)

I agree that the mainstream media doesn't cover labor well (anywhere), but the trouble I have with the sources cited is that they're all advocacy groups, as far as I can tell. As such, they have an agenda which could be suspect to the casual reader.

After all, if I see someone writing for the Weekly Standard or a byline from AEI or Heritage, I judge differently than if it were emanating from the Post, the NYT, or any large daily.

The fact that a publication is a Large Daily doesn't give it any greater access to Truth than anything else.

Moreover, we're talking about stuff in Iraq, you know, the place where reporters were "embedded."

If you choose to doubt the veracity of these reports until the Post and Times pick them up, I imagine you're going to be waiting a very long while.

The one thing I'll say for reports coming from "advocacy groups" is that at least they're up front about arguing for a side. The mainstream media does that all time, only denies that it does it.

Found the clips from the Juan Cole post on Iraqi labor law and US discussion of it (my comments in
italics). This is reasonably on-topic, so..

------------ juancole.com December 2003-------

The Interim Governing Council has also taken up the issue of how to set up democratic trade unions in
Iraq. IGC member Raja' al-Khuza'i said that the pressing issue was how to enable the trade unions to function so as to empower their members, in the crucial period leading up to the election of a transitional government. She said it was crucial that the unions develop a new role, given that under Saddam they had been instruments of state control rather than grass roots organizations.

US audiences will find this latter subject dry as dust and uninteresting. Only about %13 of American
workers are unionized, and most newspapers do not any longer have a labor reporter. (The low rates of
unionization partially result from the decline of smokestack industries where workers were easy to
organize on the shop floor, and partially from rightwing US judges winking at corporations' systematic union-busting activities.)

And very much from the systematic dismantling of laws protecting organizing started under Reagan
and still ongoing.

But for a largely working class society like Iraq, the unions are extremely important potentially, and it is hard to see how you get democracy there without democratic unions.

Hey, they're important here, too, and the same point holds about democracy. I can think of several states where there would barely be a Democratic party, and hence one-party rule, without unions. How can someone working in Michigan think all this only applies to "largely working class" societies, whatever that means? The phrase makes me wonder about Cole's mental picture of the U.S. class structure.

This is a point made by historian John Dower in his work on the post-war reconstruction of Japan. Grass
roots constituencies were found for democracy there, including free farmers, e.g. The New Dealers who crafted a new Germany and Japan recognized the importance of strong trade unions. The laissez faire American administration of Iraq appointed by Bush is deeply hostile to the Iraqi working classes, and favors shock therapy in hopes of jerry-rigging a new Iraqi bourgeoisie (which is likely to consist of robber barons, as in Russia).

The laissez-faire administration of the U.S. headed by Bush is deeply hostile to the American working classes, and favors shock therapy in hopes of enriching established robber barons. I think the facts bear that out, and U.S. labor laws are one of the most important arenas for beginning to undo the damage of the last few decades.

So, Raja' al-Khuza'i, who works hard on women's issues, is now pushing another key set of issues,
around organized labor, that will have an enormous impact on how Iraqi society develops long after
Halliburton has made its money and disappeared. One fears she will not get much meaningful support
from Washington on either issue.

One is damned sure of it, if by 'Washington' one means 'the Bush administration.' What I wonder is how much support, even rhetorical support, she will get from influential Democrats who claim to care about women and workers.

More on the raid here. Bacon has done a number of articles on the Iraqi labor movement. Check here.

So let me get this straight: Saddam Hussein crushed the Iraqi labor movement and you lefties didn't raise a peep. In fact, you did everything you could to see to it that he would CONTINUE to crush the Iraqi labor movement. Now suddenly it's our fault because we crushed a Baathist-infested Iraqi labor HQ? Your hypocricy sticks out like a sore thumb. Hell, it sticks out like Roseanne's ass.

Because of our intervention, the Iraqis will have an opportunity to have a real labor movement. No thanks to you, though. Thanks to the American military.

It's no wonder you couldn't win an election as dogcatcher any place where anyone has any common sense.