Summary
The company whose Haifa facilities employed hundreds of Arab and Jewish workers whose strike at the end of February 1935 for higher wages, shorter hours and better conditions inspired the railway workers’ spring 1935 mobilization (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1922-1924).
Details
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Haifa-area railway workers were particularly affected by the IPC workers’ militancy, perhaps because they had long been in direct daily contact with IPC workers, most of whom reached their jobs by train; the railway unions’ joint committee quickly issued a leaflet expressing solidarity with the IPC workers (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 1922-1924).
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In Chapter 2 the Iraq Petroleum Company and its Haifa refinery are listed among the mixed workplaces where joint organisation was the immediate problem for the Histadrut (lines 866-868).
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Chapter 5 gives the 1935 IPC strike in full: construction of the IPC’s Haifa facilities (storage tanks and an oil dock for oil pumped from northern Iraq through a pipeline crossing Transjordan and northern Palestine) had only recently been completed; on February 9, 1935 some fifty workers of an IPC contractor successfully struck for higher wages, and when the company announced layoffs and wage cuts a strike erupted on February 22, spreading within a week from some 150 skilled workers to some 600 of the IPC’s 800 workers, almost all Arabs, demanding rescission of the cuts, a minimum wage of 15 piastres a day, an eight-hour day and six-day week and overtime pay (lines 2507-2518).
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The Palestine Arab Workers Society had most workers’ support, its counsel Hanna ‘Asfur negotiating, while the Palestine Labor League represented some one hundred IPC drivers it had organised; management’s attempt to exclude Eliyahu Agassi from a meeting was refused by the PAWS leaders, and the Histadrut backed the strike and appealed for a strike fund. Fakhri al-Nashashibi’s intervention — secret negotiations, declared trust in the company’s “good intentions” — persuaded the strike committee to endorse his agreement, and most strikers returned on March 11; in following months IPC management reneged on many of its promises and largely destroyed the PAWS’ organisation among its workers (lines 2507-2518).
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Lockman records that the “great” IPC strike, though only a partial victory, aroused great interest among and had a strong impact on Arab workers across Palestine, and was seen by many contemporary Arab and Jewish observers as marking the beginning of a new stage in the emergence of a class-conscious Arab working class (lines 2516-2518).
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An earlier case in Chapter 5: in July 1932 a delegation of construction workers employed by the contractor ‘Aziz Khayyat on a large project at the IPC installation and the nearby Customs Office sought the Haifa Workers’ Council’s help over their twelve-and-a-half-hour day (lines 2361-2376).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Haifa, Palestine Railways, Histadrut, Palestine Arab Workers Society, Eliyahu Agassi, Hanna ‘Asfur, Fakhri al-Nashashibi