2026-05-01T16:32:37+00:00
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Shafaq News
As much of the world marks May 1 as a tribute to the labor
movement, Iraq’s roughly 15 million workers face a holiday largely emptied of
its meaning. International Labor Organization data shows that 66.6% of total
employment in the country is informal –workers operating without contracts, without
legal guarantees, and largely outside the reach of the state.
The conditions that produce that figure are visible across
construction sites, car washes, and shop floors, where complaints of meager
wages, punishing hours, and the near-total absence of legal protection have
turned the holiday into something closer to a reminder of what Iraqi labor does
not have.
Name Without Content
In Baghdad’s industrial zone, Ali Mohammed begins each shift
at a car wash at 08:00 a.m. and finishes at 06:00 p.m. —sometimes not before 7
or 8 in the evening. For that day’s work, he told Shafaq News, he earns 10,000
Iraqi dinars, or just over six dollars, and the shop owner provides no work
allowances 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 find
better-paying work with shorter hours, but unemployment has closed those doors.
Ali Saadoun, a bricklayer, dismissed International Labor Day
as “just a name without content.” What mattered to him was finishing his work
and collecting his daily pay, while the talk of workers’ rights from government
and trade unions is “a laughable lie repeated at every occasion.” Workers cling
to whatever job they can find, however poor the wage and hard the conditions,
because the alternative is hunger for their families, and when employers
withhold pay, the worker has no real recourse —neither the law nor the unions
deliver justice.
Working women face the system at its sharpest. Lama Abdulkarim
worked 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, he
dismissed 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, and
walk out quietly.”
Lama’s experience reflects a labor market in which women are
barely present to begin with. ILO figures put female labor force participation
in Iraq at roughly 11.76% against 74% for men, leaving the bulk of Iraqi women
excluded 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 Iraqi
Federation of Trade Unions, acknowledged that workers’ conditions remain
structurally precarious, particularly in the private sector and the informal
economy. He cited youth unemployment, the prevalence of work without formal
contracts or legal guarantees, sharp pay gaps between the public and private
sectors, unsafe workplaces, and chronic delays in disbursing wages.
Al-Jabri’s proposed remedies center on enforcement: applying
the minimum wage in line with actual living costs, establishing strict
oversight to curb exploitation, protecting workers from arbitrary dismissal,
guaranteeing safe workplaces, defending the freedom to organize without
pressure, and obliging employers to issue formal contracts. “Achieving social
justice 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 most
private-sector workers operate without contracts or safeguards. The majority
earn less than 300,000 dinars (around $230) a month —a figure that falls below
Iraq’s statutory minimum wage of 350,000 IQD, set under Labor Law No. 37 of
2015 and left unchanged since.
Read more: Iraq’s workers rise: New union challenges old guard
Baghdad saw these problems, and more, carried into the
streets on Friday, when a large march moved from Firdos Square toward Nasr
Square. Marchers raised banners calling for the activation of the civil service
law, the adoption of a fair salary scale, and the establishment of a social and
health insurance system that would protect workers’ dignity.
The demands are not new, and neither are the conditions that
produced them. For Iraq’s labor force, May Day this year arrived less as a
celebration than as a measure of how far the rhetoric of workers’ rights still
sits from the conditions in which most of them work.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.
