America is today, as it has been throughout nearly all of its history, a nation at war overseas, as well as against elements of its own population. Activists like California-based David Bacon, and organizations such as the one to which he belongs, U.S. Labour Against the War (USLAW) are, in terms of the Bush Doctrine, enemy elements within enemy elements. Seven Oaks’ Charles Demers recently sat down with Mr. Bacon at the Canadian Autoworkers hall in New Westminster.

SEVEN OAKS: You were recently on a delegation to Iraq?
BACON: Yes. I went with the former secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco longshore union, Clarence Thomas. The two of us were sent by U.S. Labor Against the War to go to Iraq in October, make contact with the new unions that have been organising there and find out about the conditions of work, and the wages, and the general condition of Iraqi workers under the occupation.

S.O.: That’s not the Clarence Thomas that Canadian readers will think you’re talking about?
BACON: No, we call Clarence the real Clarence Thomas.

S.O.: The real Clarence Thomas, okay. We’re definitely not encouraged to talk about class in terms of our own political situations here in North America. How do people in North America react when you start talking to them about “Iraqi workers” or the “Iraqi working class”?
BACON: First of all, I think, people are very interested in finding out what is happening to workers in Iraq. It’s, I think, sometimes a surprise, certainly a surprise for workers in Canada and the U.S. to find out that there are unions in Iraq, and even to think about Iraqi people as being workers, partly because the images that we’re getting from the media from Iraq are all about war, essentially. And, Iraq is being shown to us as sort of like a place of terrible destruction -- which in a lot of ways, it is -- but in which there’s no sense of what life is like for ordinary people there, or working people. And Iraq is a huge country of 24 million people, with Baghdad as a city with 5 million people and, by and large, those people are pretty completely invisible, and so the first reaction that we’re getting is interest, because we’re telling a story that people have not heard before. And then, I think that people in both Canada and the U.S. are finding that there are things they can recognise very easily that are going on with Iraqi workers, that they can recognise from their own experience. Right now, the Bush administration, for instance, is enforcing a law that prohibits workers in the public sector in Iraq from organising. And, in the U.S. for instance, the Bush administration forbids the 170,000 workers in the Department of Homeland Security from forming unions, too. So this is pretty familiar, and people in the U.S. know what to think about one. Then, also, there’s a big privatisation campaign going on in Iraq where the occupation authorities are announcing that they intend to privatise all of the factories in which almost all Iraqi workers work, which right now belong to the Iraqi government. And certainly, workers in Canada who have gone through the privatisation of the B.C. Ferries or other enterprises like that in Canada [and who] know what the consequences can be can look at those efforts in Iraq, and find them familiar as well, too.

S.O.: What about the reverse? Do Iraqi workers know how disastrous those kinds of privatisation schemes have been for people in North America and the rest of the world?
BACON: Well, they might not specifically know about individual privatisation schemes in North America, but they know that privatisation is threatening their jobs very seriously. Even the manager of the oil refinery that we went to, the Al-Dowda oil refinery outside of Baghdad, told us that if the refinery were to be privatised he would be forced to lay off 1,500 to 3,000 people who work there. We went to a vegetable oil plant. The workers at this plant told us that if their plant was privatised that there was nobody in Iraq that has enough money to be able to buy such a large installation, and therefore they assume that it would be a foreign owner that would come in. And so, they said, well, you know, that somebody might be interested in buying the installation of the plant, but would they be interested in us as a workforce? So, they already know enough to know that this is a very likely consequence of privatisation.

S.O.: And with these kinds of layoffs and job loss facing Iraqi workers, what’s the sort of social situation, or safety net, that they can count on in the present occupation or in a situation once they’ve lost their jobs?
BACON: There isn’t.

S.O.: So that’s something else that American workers might recognise?
BACON: Really, you know, only Iraq is really more extreme than what we’re used to. Unemployment is about 70 per cent. So becoming unemployed, losing your job in Iraq, is very, very, very serious because so many other people are unemployed. But there is no system of social benefits, there is no social welfare system, and so, there is no system of public support for workers who lose their jobs right now. So, it would be almost a life-threatening event for an Iraqi worker at this point to lose their job. You know, of all the money that is being appropriated for the so-called reconstruction of Iraq -- the $87 billion most recently and the $76 billion for the war before that -- none of that money is going for setting up an unemployment benefits system, or for raising the wages of Iraqi workers, or for doing anything else that would benefit the living standards of the Iraqi people.

S.O.: And now how are Iraqi workers and the unemployed dealing with these kinds of circumstances that they are facing? Has there been any kind of an organised fight back?
BACON: First of all, in the workplaces, in Iraqi factories, workers are organising unions very rapidly. I would say there are union committees probably in most Iraqi factories right now. There are two union federations that exist on the ground there. The Iraqi Federation of Workers Trade Unions, and then the Federation of Workers Unions and Councils, and they both have active committees in many different factories. Those committees are trying to negotiate with occupation authorities or with the managers in the plants, which in fact means the occupation authorities since the occupation authorities constitute the Iraqi state at the moment which is the owner of the plants. But right now the occupation authority is saying that they refuse to talk to these new unions, and they’re hiding behind a law that was issued in 1987 by Saddam Hussein that says that workers in the public sector have no right to form unions and to bargain. But that’s not stopping Iraqi workers from fighting for, for instance, better wages and, recently, workers at one of the national oil companies, the Southern Oil Company, were able to establish a new, higher base level wage just by using their power at the point of production, threatening to stop work and stop oil production if their wages weren’t raised. So, Iraqi workers are trying to use their new union organisations as effectively as possible. And unemployed people are also organising. There are spontaneous demonstrations of unemployed people quite frequently in Iraq right now. There’s a union for the unemployed that’s affiliated with the Worker’s Union and Councils group, which organises demonstrations of unemployed people demanding jobs and unemployment insurance. So, unemployed workers are also active in trying to assert their interests, too.

S.O.: We know that the U.S. and U.K. occupation forces have put a lot of stock into presenting this occupation as a break with Saddam Hussein, as a liberation. What you’re saying is that Bremer’s administration in Iraq has actually retained some of Hussein’s more retrograde labour legislation?
BACON: Sure, they found a law of Saddam Hussein’s that they liked. And they liked it because it’s really not only convenient for them but you could almost say necessary for them to pursue the aims that they have in mind, which are basically the imposition of a neo-liberal economic order on Iraq, which includes the privatisation of the factories and the creation of a low standard or living -- a workforce with a low standard of living which they would use, then, as an attraction for attracting foreign investments. So, this is what their economic program is, and a strong Iraqi labour movement with a lot of political power would oppose both of those elements. And, workers who are organised in the workplaces themselves could be expected to resist. So, that’s why they’re enforcing this law, and that’s why they like this law. And in fact, they’ve backed it up with other decrees, one of which says that anybody advocating anything that leads to civil disorder will be treated as a prisoner of war. And they’ve even gone as far as arresting leaders of Iraqi unions now.

S.O.: In certain elements of the Left internationally, there have been people talking about the democratic or civic space that this occupation is going to bring to progressive forces in Iraq. Is the occupation creating space for the kind of union activists that you’re talking about?
BACON: Many people sort of still take this position that if the occupation were to end, Iraq would descend into some kind of chaotic violence. And the problem is really that it’s the occupation that is the source of the violence in Iraq and the armed resistance. Really, the longer the occupation goes on, the stronger the armed resistance is getting, because it offers an alternative, a political alternative, to many Iraqis who are extremely angry about the occupation and want it to end. So the longer the occupation is there, the more violence it really creates. So, the answer to the chaos and violence in Baghdad and Basra is not to prolong the occupation but to end it.

S.O.: So, onto the subject of the armed resistance. What relation, if any, does that resistance have to the union movements that you’re talking about or the movements of working and unemployed people?
BACON: Well, they share a common goal in the sense that both the armed resistance and the labour movement in Iraq call for ending the occupation, but that’s about as far as it goes... Really the Iraqi labour movement is not calling for people to go out and join the armed resistance or calling for an increase in armed actions. Their attitude towards ending the occupation is to strengthen the institutions of Iraqi society like unions and women’s organisations and political parties that can then compete in elections and become the new government of an Iraq without an occupation.

S.O.: It sort of calls to mind these recent historical memories about the difference between the first intifada and the second intifada. During the first intifada you did have far stronger union movements and women’s movements and that that led to, in a way, a more vital resistance and was able to engage more people in ending the [Israeli] occupation. Is it still fair to say that an end to the [American] occupation [of Iraq] is this sort of overwhelming, popular concern?
BACON: Yes, I think most Iraqi people want the occupation to end. All of the unions that we spoke with want it to end. And they’re also supporting the calls for the creation of a new government with popular elections. In other words, they don’t want the occupation authority to kind of do some sort of slight of hand manoeuvre in which they appoint a government in Baghdad that’s still willing to carry out the programme that the occupation authorities have laid out. They want a genuine government in Iraq that is popular, that has legitimacy because of its popular election, and in which unions and their political parties can acquire the political power that they need in order to be able to determine things like whether privatisation is going to take place, what the wage level in Iraq is going to be, what kind of labour legislation its going to have -- what the life for working people is going to be like.

S.O.: You’ve talked a lot about class divisions and social divisions and political divisions within Iraqi society. Do you have any news, in that vein, from your own home country that might hearten Canadian readers?
BACON: I think that the occupation is becoming much less popular in the U.S., or losing its base of popular support in the U.S. too. We’ve been speaking with union locals and labour councils around the U.S., Clarence and I both have since coming back from Iraq, and our feeling is that even fairly conservative union bodies have been very interested in hosting meetings in which we’ve come and talked about the occupation. I think that it’s become clear, very clear to most people in the United States, workers included, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, and that the occupation is not advancing democracy in Iraq, but in fact is keeping democracy in Iraq from taking place. Especially because the U.S. is opposing any proposals for popular elections there, which I think people in the United States have no problem in recognising what that is really all about. I think what is still in debate in the United States is what the purpose of the occupation is... And I think there’s still a lack of clarity of who Saddam Hussein was, who put him in power to begin with, and what the real purpose of the occupation is. That’s, I think, what one of the things that we’ve been able to accomplish in talking about Iraqi workers and their situation is that it sort of lays bare the economic programme that the occupation is intended to advance, and that’s one that I think that most workers in the United States don’t have more sympathy with.

S.O.: Is the election atmosphere in the United States circling the wagons, or is it opening up space for discussion about issues such as withdrawal of troops or questions about the weapons of mass destruction?
BACON: Well, the election campaign, the primaries, the Democratic Party primaries have opened up discussion about the occupation, partly because we’ve had candidates like Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, and Sharpton, who have all taken very principled, firm positions saying that the occupation ought to end and that they troops ought to come home right away. And this in turn has forced other Democratic Party candidates who are more likely to get the nomination, especially Kerry, to I think, come out much more forthrightly in opposition to the occupation than would have been the case otherwise because, after all, some of them voted for the war to begin with... The popular wisdom had it, for a while, that the Democrats lose on foreign policy. That if voters voted just on the basis of their income, or their economic questions that Democrats win, and if people vote on the basis of foreign policy that Republicans win because Republicans are supposedly stronger on issues of national security. But I also remember the Vietnam War, where candidates who called for an end to the Vietnam War won because of the popular hatred and outrage against the war. So, I think that we’re not in the same place. I don’t think that anything happens the same way twice. But I think popular opposition to the war is part of a much broader kind of revulsion at George Bush. The corruption, doing things to advance the richest tiny portion of the U.S. population, then draping himself in the flag and landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in an air flight suit and then accusing anybody that disagrees with him of being a threat to national security -- I think that there’s a lot of popular disgust with that.

S.O.: Where are you gonna be on March 20?
BACON: I’ll be in San Francisco, marching against war and occupation.

Home Features David and Goliath Stop smirking, Bettman Books this week Essays & Reviews The Big Sellout Operation Filmmaker Salud!