Shafaq News
As much of the world marks May 1 as a tribute to the labormovement, Iraq's roughly 15 million workers face a holiday largely emptied ofits meaning. International Labor Organization data shows that 66.6% of totalemployment in the country is informal –workers operating without contracts, withoutlegal guarantees, and largely outside the reach of the state.
The conditions that produce that figure are visible acrossconstruction sites, car washes, and shop floors, where complaints of meagerwages, punishing hours, and the near-total absence of legal protection haveturned the holiday into something closer to a reminder of what Iraqi labor doesnot have.
Name Without Content
In Baghdad's industrial zone, Ali Mohammed begins each shiftat a car wash at 08:00 a.m. and finishes at 06:00 p.m. —sometimes not before 7or 8 in the evening. For that day's work, he told Shafaq News, he earns 10,000Iraqi dinars, or just over six dollars, and the shop owner provides no workallowances and no meals beyond a single lunch, usually a falafel wrap. In winter,when business slows, the daily rate drops to 5,000 dinars. He has tried to findbetter-paying work with shorter hours, but unemployment has closed those doors.
Ali Saadoun, a bricklayer, dismissed International Labor Dayas “just a name without content.” What mattered to him was finishing his workand collecting his daily pay, while the talk of workers' rights from governmentand trade unions is “a laughable lie repeated at every occasion.” Workers clingto whatever job they can find, however poor the wage and hard the conditions,because the alternative is hunger for their families, and when employerswithhold pay, the worker has no real recourse —neither the law nor the unionsdeliver justice.
Working women face the system at its sharpest. Lama Abdulkarimworked 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. in a shop without a contract, social security,or any documented rights, and once her employer learned she was pregnant, hedismissed her. With no path to redress, she recalled, all she could do was“congratulate the woman hired to replace me, say goodbye to my colleagues, andwalk out quietly.”
Lama's experience reflects a labor market in which women arebarely present to begin with. ILO figures put female labor force participationin Iraq at roughly 11.76% against 74% for men, leaving the bulk of Iraqi womenexcluded from the formal economy entirely.
Rules on Paper
Iraq's own union leadership does not dispute the picture. Speaking to Shafaq News, Ali Al-Jabri, administrative director of the IraqiFederation of Trade Unions, acknowledged that workers' conditions remainstructurally precarious, particularly in the private sector and the informaleconomy. He cited youth unemployment, the prevalence of work without formalcontracts or legal guarantees, sharp pay gaps between the public and privatesectors, unsafe workplaces, and chronic delays in disbursing wages.
Al-Jabri's proposed remedies center on enforcement: applyingthe minimum wage in line with actual living costs, establishing strictoversight to curb exploitation, protecting workers from arbitrary dismissal,guaranteeing safe workplaces, defending the freedom to organize withoutpressure, and obliging employers to issue formal contracts. “Achieving socialjustice begins with delivering justice to workers themselves.”
“The situation is very complex,” according to Walid Naama,head of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, who explained that mostprivate-sector workers operate without contracts or safeguards. The majorityearn less than 300,000 dinars (around $230) a month —a figure that falls belowIraq's statutory minimum wage of 350,000 IQD, set under Labor Law No. 37 of2015 and left unchanged since.
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Baghdad saw these problems, and more, carried into thestreets on Friday, when a large march moved from Firdos Square toward NasrSquare. Marchers raised banners calling for the activation of the civil servicelaw, the adoption of a fair salary scale, and the establishment of a social andhealth insurance system that would protect workers' dignity.
The demands are not new, and neither are the conditions thatproduced them. For Iraq's labor force, May Day this year arrived less as acelebration than as a measure of how far the rhetoric of workers' rights stillsits from the conditions in which most of them work.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.