Some local experts believe the issue of government employees is also a human rights one. “As an employer the government can reduce the number of staff,” says Salam Sumaisem, an economist who advises Iraq's banking sector and activist. “But there are also labour laws and human rights issues to consider,” she told NIQASH.
In fact, as Sumaisem points out, by law employees can actually file legal suit against employers who do not pay them on time or withhold salaries – as the government is currently doing. “But nobody is talking about this issue,” she says. “Not the employees themselves or any human rights organisations.”
“Unfortunately there are no quick and easy solutions,” adds Majid Hamid Abu-Kalal, a civil society activist and head of an NGO, the Ther Development Centre, which helps unemployed people gain new skills in Muthanna.
Abu-Kalal believes that the activists who have organised protests against the government and against corruption also have a role to play in revitalising the Iraqi economy. But he stresses that these forces too need some sort of united front and coherent plan to help Iraq's economy – despite the fact that the problems come as a result of years of corruption – that “puts the interests of Iraq as a whole, first”. And, as he puts it, “the painful truth” is that they do not have one as yet and even if they did, the current political and sectarian problems in Iraq would prevent them from succeeding.
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