Securing a Global Oil Empire: The U.S. and the Challenge of Libyan Oil Workers, 1955-1981 (original) (raw)
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Labour in the making of the international relations of oil: resource nationalism and trade unions
Handbook on Oil and International Relations, 2022
The role of labour in shaping the international relations of oil has received scant scholarly attention. This chapter uses two case studies to shows how oil workers have played a significant role in shaping the international relations of the 20th century through petro-nationalism and international labour unions. The case study of Iran in the first half of the 20th century illustrates that petro-nationalism wasn't only advocated by state and intellectual elites, but that it was made into a political force by oil workers as well. On the one hand, state elites advocated petro-nationalism in their conflict with the Anglo-Persian/Iranian Oil Company and explicitly linked it to the improvement of labour conditions of Iranian oil workers as an attempt incorporate them in the nation-state building project. On the other hand, oil workers raised nationalist demands directly in their own confrontation with the oil company, exerting pressures on both state and company elites, and fuelling the growth of a popular movement that culminated in the oil nationalization of 1951. The second case study concerns the International Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers during the Cold War. It shows how American officials' concern with the growing influence of petro-nationalism and communism among oil workers in the Global South after the Second World War led them to intervene in the operations of this international labour union. This chapter argues that both the intervention of American state agencies and the anti-communist commitment of its leadership defined this union's relationship with oil workers in the Global South.
Reasons to Revolt: Iranian Oil Workers in the 1970s
2013
"Oil workers played a pivotal role during the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979. Involving tens of thousands of workers, oil strikes paralyzed the state and paved the way for the Shah’s downfall. Various accounts of these strikes, however, ignore the subjectivity and agency of the oil workers by focusing exclusively on the role of political agitation. Addressing this deficit, this article explores the oil workers’ experiences in and out of the workplace in the 1970s in order to contextualize their participation in the revolution. After analyzing the oil strikes and their goals, the article makes two arguments: First, oil workers were conscious of the considerable power they had to disrupt the economic and political routine of the country. Second, the demands of the oil strikes reflected grievances that, while reflecting sentiments in the wider society, were embedded in their own specific conditions and experiences."
, 2013
Labor relations in Hashemite Iraq cannot be separated from domestic and regional politics, nor from the rise in global consumption of petroleum. As Albert Badre pointed out, in the Arab world management came “overwhelmingly from a society with traditions and ideals that differed considerably from those which animate the society providing the labor force” (Badre, 1957, p. 19). In Iraq, most industrial managers were British, with smaller numbers of Americans, French, and German citizens. The petroleum market had expanded in an unprecedented way during the first decade after World War II. While in 1945, 7.8 million barrels were consumed every day; by 1957, the market absorbed18.3 million barrels on a quotidian basis (Badre 1957, p. 5). The United Kingdom and France were the most significant consumers of Iraqi petroleum, purchasing together a little less than half of all the country’s exports (Statistical Abstract 1955, p. 236).
Brill, 2019
Although the social reverberations of the Iranian Revolution have led historians to include it among the “great revolutions” of the twentieth century, there is much uncertainty about the scope and nature of post-revolutionary social change. This chapter plumbs the social depth of the Iranian Revolution by assessing its impact on the labour relations in the oil industry, due to the active role of its workers in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years. As the emergence of showras (factory committees) among oil and other industrial workers was the most significant expression of the changing labour relations, this chapter explores their internal developments and contentious relationship to the state from 1979 to 1989. Using newspapers, official documents, leaflets, and oral history, it argues that by creating democratic workplace procedures and interfering in the management of the oil industry, the showras played a significant role in altering labour relations. However, the changes fell short of introducing workers’ control, and were gradually reversed by the post-revolutionary state as it consolidated its power – an outcome that was caused by both internal and external factors.