PEP, April 2006: Meeting Face to Face: The Iraq-U.S. Labor Solidarity Tour

Each day as the news from Iraq gets worse, the mainstream media present the same pundits who defended the invasion. Today they say they may have made mistakes then, but now we have no choice but to stay the course.

But we rarely hear from the Iraqi people. Here at last is a documentary about workers in Iraq, their concerns and their views.

U.S. Labor Against the War led a union fact-finding mission to Iraq and then invited representatives of all three Iraqi labor federations to speak before forums of union members, labor leaders and politicians in the United States last summer.

“We face a hostile position from America: privatization, efforts to import foreign workers despite massive unemployment, and a ban on bargaining for public employees,” Iraqi unionist Adnan Al Saffar told New York City unionists June 17.

Their message was that the U.S. occupation is a major obstacle to peace. U.S. troops need to leave Iraq so Iraqis can learn to solve their own problems.

One of the most stirring sequences in the film shows Iraqi unionists cheering as the 2005 AFL-CIO Convention passed the historic resolution calling for the speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
Three years into the occupation, Saddam Hussein’s law prohibiting collective bargaining by public employees is still in force. But unionization has grown rapidly and now over 300,000 Iraqi workers are in unions. They are unanimously opposed to U.S. and World Bank plans to privatize Iraq’s oil and other major public industries.

“Meeting Face to Face: The Iraq-U.S. Labor Solidarity Tour” is a 27-minute DVD ($9.95 or $14.95 for the VHS) which includes a 12-minute condensed version perfect for presentation at union and other meetings. It was produced by Jonathan Levin and Michael Zweig of the Center for the Study of Working Class Life. For more information contact USLAW (www.uslaboragainstwar.org), which promotes projects to help Iraqi unionists, including the peace demonstration in New York City on Saturday, April 29.

— Ken Nash
DC 37 Ed. Fund Library, Rm. 211