Global Oil and the Nationalization of Labor

• In Event: Jews, Labor, and the Politics of Work

Abstract

This paper examines the role of the Iraq Petroleum Company in exacerbating Jewish-Arab national tensions in the name of breaking the labor movement. From 1935-48, Jews and Arabs worked together in various capacities at oil refineries on either end of the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline. The refineries were owned and operated by the Iraq Petroleum Company, a forerunner of the contemporary BP, which included no Iraqis and no Iraqi input in its management strategy. Labor conditions differed at the two refineries, but a sense of worker solidarity characterized the culture at both locations. Through their dialogue, workers also envisioned alternate configurations of the state (or future state) and its potential relationship to resource wealth. When Communist organizing gained ground, management launched a coordinated campaign to oppose the party and break worker unity by inciting Jewish-Arab tensions.
Such a campaign began in Haifa following a strike in which workers shut down the refinery. Fearful of the precedent setting power of the strike, IPC management agreed to several of the demands and restored the plant to its productive capacity. Management thereafter played on deepening tensions between Arab and Jewish workers in order to thwart concerted efforts to improve labor conditions.
The popular and well-structured Iraqi Communist Party began organizing at Haditha, the bifurcation point of the pipeline. Oil workers completely shut down the Haditha station for two weeks in 1948 until the company surrounded it with arms and cut off food supplies. Rather than improve conditions or answer the calls for commodity ownership by the wider public, the IPC allowed Iraqis to assert nationalism by shutting down the pipeline in the name of boycotting the Jewish state.
The strategy of breaking the labor movement by inciting nationalist tensions ultimately proved counter-productive. The Haifa refinery ceased production after high-casualty Jewish-Arab battles in December 1947 and was seized by Israel during the 1948 war. Following the war, the Iraqi government would never again open the pipeline. The IPC mode of dividing labor paved the way for the nationalization of oil infrastructure.

author

• Rachel Havrelock, University of Illinois at Chicago