KIRKUK, Kurdistan Region — Of the nearly 1,000 people who were recently employed by the Iraqi North Oil Company (NOC) in Kirkuk, only 25 are Kurdish, displaying Baghdad’s increasing opposition to hiring technicians with Kurdish backgrounds, according to NOC manager Yousif Shwani, a Kurd.
“We have been trying for some time now to increase Kurdish share of the employments, but Baghdad is making the decisions unilaterally and has not been responsive,” Shwani said.
According to Shwani, the NOC management which is based in Kirkuk has little influence over the employment process as the Iraqi central government is the main provider of salaries for over 12,000 employees that currently work for the company.
City officials say they plan to replace North Oil Company with an oil institution that is more local and managed by Kirkuk’s own people which they say could have an impact on reducing poverty and unemployments in the province.
“Only 1,923 people are Kurdish of the 12,631 employees working for the NOC. The rest, some 76 percent, are Arabs and Turkmen,” said Ahmed Askari, head of the oil committee at the Kirkuk Provincial council.
Askari added that many of the employees are people from outside of Kirkuk which he said had a negative impact on the economy of the province.
Although no reliable data is available on the unemployment rates in Kirkuk, officials maintain that the conditions for the impoverished labor force has deteriorated following the influx of some 600,000 refugees in the province.
“Since the start of this year, nearly 30,000 people have been registered at our offices who have no work and need financial support, many of them collage graduates,” said Joma Muhammad Amin, head of the Social Affairs’ Office in Kirkuk where jobseekers turn to for assistance in the labor market or social protection handouts.
The financial crisis exacerbated by the refugee influx has particularly reduced job opportunities for the unskilled work force in the city who largely depend on day to day employments.
Laborer Jasim Hussein, father of five, said he had not worked for the past month despite the dramatic decline of wages since the city received thousands of displaced people from conflict zone elsewhere in Iraq.
“Before we had received up to 50,000 dinars (ca $40) for every workday and there was plenty of work. But now we would do the same job for 15,000 (ca $10) and yet we get nothing, because there are more refugee workers,” Hussein added.
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