On April 9, 2003, U.S. tanks pulled up to Basra’s huge, dilapidated oil refinery.

“We were coming out early, at the end of our shift, and there was the American army,” recalls Faraj Arbat, one of the plant’s firemen. The soldiers trained their guns on the oil workers. The head of the fire department made the mistake of questioning the troops, and he was ordered to lie facedown on the ground.

“He did as he was ordered,” Arbat recalls. “But then an American put his foot on his back. So we started fighting with the soldiers with our fists. The tank turret started to turn toward us, and at that point we all sat down.”

While a small core of Baathist loyalists were among the refinery’s workers, after thirty years of Saddam Hussein, the vast majority had more than had their fill of war and repression. They were prepared to welcome almost any change that removed the old regime, even foreign troops. But they did not expect the American heavy-handedness. They also felt a strong sense of pride in keeping Iraq’s oil industry going.

So in the ensuing days, most workers stayed and tried to bring the plant back into operation. “Slowly we got production restored, by our own efforts,” says Arbat. “Electricity workers, at their own expense, brought power back to the refinery. We found where the water pipes had been blown up, and went out with armed guards to repair them. Meanwhile, the Americans and British began coming with tanker trucks, loading up on the gas and oil we were producing.” For two months, no one got paid.

Finally, Arbat and a small group began to organize a union. “The word frightened people, because under Saddam, unions had become instruments of oppression,” he explains. Nevertheless, a few dozen of the refinery’s 3,000 employees came together and chose Arbat and another activist to lead them. And lead they did. To force authorities to pay the workers, the small group took a crane out to the gate and lowered it across the road. Behind it, two dozen tanker trucks pulled up with a heavily armed British military escort.

By the end of the day, the Iraqi oil ministry paid the workers. Within a week, everyone at the refinery had joined the oil union.

“At first, there were only 100 of us, but workers began coming out,” Arbat recalls. “Some took their shirts off and told the troops, ‘Shoot us.’ Others lay down on the ground.” Ten of them even went under the tankers, brandishing cigarette lighters. They announced that if the soldiers fired, they would set the tankers alight.” This was not a threat of terrorism; they did not intend to kill innocent people. But they were willing to give their lives in defense of their jobs and their national resource.

By the end of the day, the Iraqi oil ministry paid the workers. Within a week, everyone at the refinery had joined, and the oil union in Basra had been reborn.

That oil union is one of Iraq’s oldest institutions. Originally organized under the British in the early 1920s, it has always been the heart of the country’s labor movement. “Iraq’s two biggest strikes, in 1946 and 1952, were organized by oil workers,” says Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the newly reorganized General Union of Oil Employees. After Saddam seized power, he persecuted unionists and banned independent organizing in the public sector, which includes the oil industry.

But today, the oil union is once again Iraq’s largest, most powerful labor organization, with 23,000 members in southern Iraq. Together with two other labor federations and a handful of independent professional associations, the labor movement is now the biggest secular institution in Iraqi civil society—and the one most opposed to Bush’s privatization schemes.

“We’re afraid that the purpose of the occupation is to take control of the oil industry,” explains Hassan Juma’a Awad, president of the General Union of Oil Employees. “It is our duty as Iraqi workers to protect the oil installations, since they are the property of the Iraqi people. We’re sure that U.S. and international companies are here to put their hands on the oil.”

While unionists in Iraq have faced hostility from the U.S. Army and from officials of the occupation, they also have had to contend with brutal assaults at the hands of the insurgents. This has left them with little breathing space, but they’re making the most of it.

Unions occupy a critical but perilous position. As the most vocal opponents of privatization, they confront the occupation’s economic plan directly. So far, the oil union has successfully resisted privatization attempts in its own industry and helped other unions resist it, as well. When the occupation began, KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, was given a no-bid contract to put out oil fires in the huge Rumaila fields. But within weeks, it had taken over the financial functions of Basra’s civil administration.

To get paid, all workers in state enterprises there had to take their time sheets to local KBR offices for approval. That was galling enough, but when KBR hired a Kuwaiti contractor to bring in a foreign contract workforce to do reconstruction in the oil installations, workers saw a clear threat to their jobs.

By August 2003, oil workers had organized unions in ten state-owned companies in southern Iraq and formed the General Union of Oil Employees. They gave KBR an August 20 deadline to leave the oil sector. When the company refused to talk with them, they shut down oil production for export.

“For two days we didn’t move,” says Farouk Sadiq, a union leader and teacher at Basra’s Oil Institute. “We refused to pump a single drop until they left. We said we wanted them to leave by peaceful means—otherwise we had another language to speak with them. Other workers in Basra refused to work too, and the American authority saw we could affect what really matters to them. It was independence day for oil labor.” KBR did leave the oil districts and closed their payroll offices in Basra.

In September 2003, Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, issued the Bush Administration’s plan for transforming the Iraqi economy. Order #30 allowed the privatization of state-owned industry, including transportation ports, communications, and most manufacturing. It also permitted the total repatriation of profits outside the country. Order #29 lowered the base industrial wage from $60 to $40 a month and cut payments for food and housing. In December 2003, the union directly challenged Bremer’s wage order and threatened to strike again if wages were lowered. This time, the oil minister caved in without a work stoppage. Eventually, the bottom two wage grades were abolished in the oil industry, bringing the base wage up to about $85 a month. (The rest of Bremer’s orders remain in effect. Before handing over power, Bremer made sure that these orders would be folded into a transitional law that governs Iraq until a new constitution is written and a new government elected.)

Basra’s workers continued to challenge privatization and forced two more corporate contractors to leave. In mid-2004, port workers, oil workers, and others persuaded the notoriously anti-union Stevedoring Services of America to leave the port of Umm Qasr. The company had been given a $4.8 million contract by the U.S. Agency for International Development to take over the terminals. In nearby Zubair, the Danish shipping giant Maersk also took control of that port’s docks when the occupation began, a reward from Washington and London to Copenhagen for sending troops. Maersk removed the port’s skilled employees and replaced them with its own workforce.

The new dock union challenged the company’s right to run the port this spring, and on March 2, 600 longshoremen, oil workers, and supporters descended on Zubair. They blocked its access road for three days, and in the end, Maersk, like Stevedoring Services of America and KBR, agreed to go. In May, the General Union of Oil Employees organized a conference at the cultural center of the oil industry in downtown Basra, under a banner calling on Iraqis “to revive the public sector and build an Iraq free of privatization.”

Bringing together union leaders from rigs and refineries, economists from Basra University, representatives of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, and political parties ranging from the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to Iraq’s communists, the conference sought to forge a consensus to resist oil privatization.

“The public sector economy of Iraq is one of the symbols of the achievement of Iraqis since the revolution of July 4th, 1958,” the conference statement declared. “The national wealth and resources of Iraq belong to the Iraqi people,” said Iraq’s three major labor union federations at the end of a U.S. tour this spring. “We are united in our opposition to the imposition of privatization of the Iraqi economy by the occupation, the IMF, the World Bank foreign powers, and any force that takes away the right of the Iraqi people to determine their own economic fate.”

“We’ve been like the camel that carries gold, but is given thorns to eat.”

Rank-and-file workers are suspicious of privatization, despite the carrot of modernization used by its supporters to make it seem attractive. At the Basra refinery, senior fireman Abdul Faisal Jaleel criticized Saddam Hussein’s long failure to invest in modern technology, or even spare parts, and said workers paid the price. “We’ve been like the camel that carries gold, but is given thorns to eat,” he said. Nevertheless, he added, foreign ownership is not the answer. “We reject foreign investment. We want to keep our own oil revenues and use them to develop our country with our own hands.”

Another fireman at the refinery echoed Jaleel’s sentiments. “Our grandfathers stood up to the British guns and planes with picks and shovels,” said Tefiq Jassim. “The day will come again when our people will drive out the British and U.S. armies.” But the threat to privatize Iraqi oil is growing. The cabinet approved a “measure that would, for the first time, allow private industry to enter what is now an entirely state-run oil-export business,” The New York Times reported on August 11.

According to the paper, the government has agreed to let private companies buy up refineries, something the oil unions will no doubt resist. It’s unlikely that the oil reserves themselves will be privatized, says Greg Muttitt of the British group Platform, which works for social and ecological justice. “More likely,” he says, “Iraq’s debt will be used to force the government to sign production-sharing agreements with the multinationals.”

“This is not liberation, it is occupation,” says Ghasib Hassan, a leader of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we thought we’d seen the end of colonies, but now we’re entering a new era of colonization.”

Given their resistance to the occupation, the unions have run afoul of the government and the U.S. military. First Bremer and now the interim government have refused to rescind Saddam Hussein’s 1987 edict that Iraqi workers in state enterprises are prohibited from forming unions. Then U.S. troops started to crack down. They tossed the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions out of their office in the city’s central bus station in December 2003 and arrested members of its executive board. Qasim Hadi, general secretary of the Union of the Unemployed, has been arrested several times by occupation troops for leading demonstrations of unemployed workers demanding unemployment benefits and jobs.

Last fall, when textile workers in Kut struck over pay, the city governor called out the Iraqi National Guard, who fired on them, wounding four. The occupation, however, is not the unions’ only adversary. On February 18, Ali Hassan Abd, a leader of one of the unions at Baghdad’s Al Daura oil refinery, was walking home with his young children when gunmen ran up and shot him. Less than a week later, armed men gunned down Ahmed Adris Abbas in Baghdad’s Martyrs’ Square. Adris Abbas was an activist in the Transport and Communications Union.

These two murders followed the torture and assassination of Hadi Saleh, the Iraqi Federation’s international secretary, in Baghdad on January 4. Just weeks before his murder, Saleh tried to explain what was going on. “Extremists who target trade unionists kill them under the notion that they are collaborating with a state created by the Americans,” he said at a meeting of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Japan. “It’s a risk for all civil society organizations.”

The targeting of trade unionists is a particularly alarming feature of life in occupied Iraq. “The torture and murder of labor leaders in Iraq has become a troubling trend in a country where trade unionists still operate under anti-union legislation, which dates back to the Saddam era,” the confederation says. Iraqi unionists attribute the murders to remnants of Saddam’s secret police, the old Mukhabharat, which was notoriously brutal toward labor organizers.

“They seem to operate freely,” says Hassan Juma’a Awad. “An attack on myself will take place,” Juma’a says, “but I am not afraid.”