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IRAQI OIL-WORKERS HAVE A RIGHT TO REPRESENTATION, SAYS MSP |
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Monday, 27 August 2007 |
Bill Wilson, MSP for the West of Scotland region, today lodged a Parliamentary Motion condemning the recent banning of oil trade unions in Iraq.
Speaking after lodging it, Dr Wilson said that he had been following developments in Iraq with great concern for some time. “An apparently logical explanation for what has happened and is happening in Iraq would be that the UK and US governments’ main preoccupation is the profits of multinational companies. With Iraq full of foreign troops the Iraqi government’s policies are almost certainly approved by — if not directly dictated by — Washington and Westminster, so the recent directive, banning oil companies from dealing with trade unions, is likely to be their policy. This appears aimed at silencing legitimate opposition to the proposed oil law, a law which would effectively sign away the control of Iraq’s oil industry to foreign interests for the next 30 years.
“The UK government claims to believe in the rule of law but the directive violates Iraq’s own constitution and ILO Convention 98 (on the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining), which Iraq has ratified. To avoid accusations of hypocrisy and complicity our government should, at the very least, express strong disapproval of the Iraqi oil minister’s actions. Iraqis not only have the right to control their country’s resources but they also need a decent share of the oil revenue in order to reconstruct their shattered country. Iraq oil-workers must be allowed to say as much through their legitimate representative bodies, the oil trade unions.”
Dr Wilson concluded his remarks by saying, “If anyone doubts the anti-democratic regressive nature of recent developments in the Iraq I would point out that the most recent directive banning oil companies from dealing with trade unions is a repeat of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Decree 8750, issued by the occupational forces in 2003 to prevent public-sector oil workers from forming trade unions. This, in turn, can be genealogically traced to Saddam’s Decree 150, which banned all public-sector unions. The Iraqi government, with the apparent tacit support of the UK and the USA, is effectively employing the tools of suppression used by Saddam Hussein.” |
