The Social Justice Photography of David Bacon: Part Two, Working Class Life on Iraq’s Oil Rigs

These photographs, shown in the halls of California oil workers and longshoremen, revealed to them how their counterparts in Iraq were treated, often by the same oil monopolies.

by David Bacon

May 27, 2019

3:35 PM

David Bacon (Part 2, teaser)

Editor's note: We’re delighted to share the second of a multi-part series from the archives of photographer David Bacon. A former union organizer, Bacon’s thirty years of photographs and writing capture the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special Collections in Stanford University’s Green Library.

Part Two tells of his visit to the oil fields of post-war Iraq and what the refinery workers told him about how they forced Halliburton out of Basra—one of the first big victories of the time for Iraqi unions.

As millions of people marched against the invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s, many carried signs pointing an accusing finger at Dick Cheney and Halliburton – “No Blood for Oil!” But beyond seeing that oil as a motivating factor for the war, people did not necessarily understand much about the role oil plays in Iraqi life, or about the workers who pump it from the ground and refine it.

In 2013, I went to Baghdad with a longshore union leader, Clarence Thomas, to learn how the occupation was affecting Iraq’s workers and unions. I took photographs and talked with factory workers in the Daura oil refinery. I began to see oil’s central role. I realized that further documentation meant going to southern Iraq, where most of the industry is located.

A year after returning from Baghdad, Hassan Juma’a, president of a newly-reorganized oil workers union in Iraq, asked me to come to Basra. With the help of Ewa Jasciewicz, in 2015 I traveled with several British activists to attend a conference organized by the union to oppose handing over the country’s oil industry to the giant oil monopolies. The union put me up at the guesthouse in the Basra oil refinery, where I woke up to the roar of its machinery, and went to sleep in the orange glow of the fires burning off the excess gasses. The workers said they could protect me in the refinery, but not at a hotel inside the city. When we traveled out to the oil rigs, or down to the port to interview longshore workers, vans of armed union activists drove in front and behind us.

In Basra, workers told me that in the occupation’s first year, Halliburton, the company formerly headed by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, had been given a contract to take over all the financial operations of the civil administration in the south, including paying the wages of oil workers. If you worked on a rig or in the refinery, you had to hand in your time sheet at the Halliburton office to get paid.

I went to Basra determined to take photographs and record interviews that would give U.S. unions and workers a sense of their Iraqi brothers and sisters, and how they were affected by the occupation.

People in the U.S. and Europe were generally unaware of this corruption, and knew almost nothing about the workers who make the oil industry function. I went to Basra determined to take photographs and record interviews that would pierce this invisibility. I wanted to give unions and workers in the U.S. a sense of who their brothers and sisters were, and how they were affected by the occupation.

Originally organized under the British in the early 1920s, the oil union was always the heart of the country’s labor movement. Iraq's two biggest strikes, in 1946 and 1952, were organized by oil workers, and helped build the movement for Iraq's social revolution in 1958. The reorganization of the oil union in Iraq is a heroic story, one told in The Progressive.

In that article I recounted what the refinery workers told me they did to get rid of Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR. At the Basra refinery a small group took a crane out to the gate, and lowered it across the road. Behind it, dozens of tanker trucks began stacking up, unable to leave with their loads of oil and gasoline. Soon a heavily armed military escort pulled up to get Halliburton's oil moving again.

“At first there were only 100 of us, but workers began coming out,” I was told by Faraj Arbat, one of the plant’s firemen. “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.

The soldiers did not fire. Instead, by the end of the day, the workers had been paid the wages Halliburton had been withholding. Within a week, everyone at the refinery had joined, and the oil union in Basra had been reborn. Finally, oil workers took action to stop Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR from raking off profits from their wages. They stopped work. Three days of paralysis in the oil fields was enough to force Halliburton out of Basra - one of the first big victories of Iraqi unions.

I came back with stories like these, and photographs showing what life in the oil fields was like for the people working there. The group, US Labor Against the War, managed to get visas for a handful of Iraqi union leaders to come to the U.S. and tell their stories in person. Two spoke to audiences on the east coast, and another pair went to the Midwest. Oil union leaders Hassan Juma’a and Falih Abood traveled the west coast from southern California to Washington.

In Los Angeles the U.S. oil workers union gave the Iraqis laptop computers. Exhibitions of photographs in the halls of oil workers and longshoremen showed California workers how their counterparts in Iraq were treated, often by the same oil monopolies. Iraqis explained that they saw the country’s oil as the people’s property—the only resource that could pay the enormous cost of rebuilding their country after decades of war.

In city after city, audiences rose to their feet applauding. The relationships they built with U.S. unions have endured since.

In city after city, audiences rose to their feet applauding when Hassan Juma’a and Falih Abood walked in to speak. The relationships they built then with U.S. unions have endured through the years since.

Another Iraqi union leader from Basra, Hashmeya Muhsin, the head of the electrical workers union and first woman to lead a national union in Iraq, came to the U.S. in the years afterwards. By the time she arrived, some union women here already knew her from the photograph I took of Hashmeya at a union meeting in Basra. I hope the photograph helped inspire the invitation to come and speak.

These photographs were documentation with a purpose. Photographers often speak about “putting the human face” on a particular social problem or movement. These images certainly introduced the human faces of Iraqi oil workers to workers here. They also helped to bring them to the United States where they could speak for themselves, finding common ground with the workers of the country occupying theirs. So if they helped to encourage peace and solidarity, the photographs served a good purpose.

In the years since they were taken I’ve written many other articles about Iraq and its workers. The latest, tells of the political alliance formed by Iraqi unions and left activists in the 2018 election.

Photos 1-2: Workers in the Basra Oil Refinery.

Photo 3: A pressure tank damaged by shells and bombs from the war with Iran, and later from U.S. bombing, in the Basra Oil Refinery.

Photo 4: "Iraq Free 2005" is painted on a dead machine in the shop of the Basra Oil Refinery.

Photo 5: Faraj Arbat and members of the plant fire department discuss the privatization of the oil industry in the Basra Oil Refinery.

Photo 6: Ibrahim Arabi, leader of the union at the Basra Oil Refinery, at home in Basra. A picture of Islamic cleric Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the electoral bloc supported by many unions and leftwing groups, is in on the door. Arabi was blacklisted by the oil ministry for his union activity.

Photos 7-9: Workers drill and eat together on an oil rig in the South Rumaila oil field outside of Basra, in southern Iraq. Abdi Settar Ajid, assistant driller, controls the speed of the drill on the oil rig. He has been drilling oil wells for 30 years.

Photo 10: Hassan Juma'a Awad, President of the General Union of Oil Employees.

Photo 11: Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein, President of the Electricity and Energy Union in Basra - the first woman to be elected as a national trade union leader in Iraq’s history.

Photo 12: A worker disabled in a refinery accident at his home in Basra, with a picture of the Muslim martyr Hussein on the wall.

Photo 13: Emad Mohsin Jabar, a leader of Basra's oil workers' union, and his son look over the shipping container which his employer, the South Oil Company, gave him as a place to live when he went to work there 13 years ago. Now the family uses it for storage.

Photos 14-15: Hanan, the wife of Emad Mohsin Jafar, and his daughter Nura.

Photo 16: The wreckage of war - tank treads and turrets - in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The wreckage includes depleted uranium ammunition, a big health hazard to residents, dissolved in a pond of toxic waste next to apartment buildings.