The protesters, some of whom have been working with the Shiite endowment by contract for the past 15 years, called on the government to make their employment permanent.
“We ask for permanent employment. Three generations of the rest of the directorates have been granted permanent employment, but we have not been until now,” Ahmad Abdulrahman, who has been working with the office for the past 13 years, told Rudaw’s Mustafa Goran, calling on Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani to address their concerns, saying “we are tired, and we have had enough.”
The total number of those who are contract-based with the Shiite Endowment Office is around 7,000, working a variety of jobs including guarding holy shrines, doing media work, cooking, and running administrative affairs.
This is the third protest of its kind that they have held in the course of the past two months, but they have not yet received any answer from the government.
The Shiite Endowment Office was established in 2003 by the Iraqi Governing Council after the fall of Saddam Hussein that year. It was created after the dissolution of the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs in the former Baath rule.
The Shiite endowment is designed to run affairs of the holy shrines, the mosques, the hawzas, and all religious endowments of the Shiite sect in Iraq.
As the drafting of the Iraqi budget for the year of 2023 looms, workers from several government sectors have held numerous protests in recent months demanding permanent employment contracts from the Iraqi government.
At least five people were wounded in Kirkuk on Monday as police applied force to disperse hundreds of angry demonstrators who protested the lack of employment by the city’s North Oil Company and tried to storm its headquarters.
