BAGHDAD - Morning after morning, they arrive in ragged ones and twos, until dusty plazas across the city are clogged with one of Iraq's most volatile populations: the unemployed.
To understand many of the tensions shaping Iraq more than seven months after the United States took control, there is perhaps no better place to begin than with the teeming open-air job markets for day laborers that illustrate a startling statistic: As much as 50 percent of the work force remains unemployed.
As Iraqis will tell you, salaries were paltry and the work was vapid in Saddam Hussein's controlled economy, but at least jobs were reliable. For many, the new plague of unemployment has come to symbolize not just economic disarray, but a fundamental gap between American promises and Iraqi reality.
"Under Saddam, we were working regularly," Mohammed Hamoud Fayel, 30, shouted above the din of one of the day laborers' markets, clutching the splintery, dented shovel he used in the Saddam era. "Now I do nothing but wait here until someone can hire me."
"It is a serious situation"
The unemployment problem contributes to and reflects Iraq's most vexing problems. It produces legions of idle and angry young men whom Iraqi and U.S. officials say make willing recruits for unrest or resistance. It reflects a land still so unsafe that foreign firms have been slow to launch job-creating projects. And it feeds a mounting strain between new haves and have-nots, as the middle class prospers in the market economy.
"It is a serious situation," said Nouri Jafer, a senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. "The idle are being pushed to illegal ways. Our big concern is how do we get control and find a solution."
With no firm statistics available, Jafer estimates that 50 percent of the nation's working-age people are unemployed. Lt. Col. James Otwell, the senior American adviser on labor issues, counters that the percentage is "somewhere in the 30s."
Either way, it doesn't take precise figures for Iraqi and U.S. officials to agree with a joint report released in October by the United Nations and the World Bank on the rebuilding of Iraq. "This large (unemployed) population can either become a source of serious instability if joblessness persists or a considerable boost to Iraq's economic growth," the report said.
Living standard better for some
Like so much of postwar Iraq, the employment picture is mixed. The standard of living is rising rapidly for many Iraqis. Salaries have increased tenfold for police officers and teachers, giving many people their first-ever access to satellite dishes, dishwashers and luxury cars. But so far, millions of others are not rising with the tide, and that fuels resentment.
"You have to look at who is getting the purchasing power," said Mudhar Shawkat, a senior adviser in the Iraqi National Congress, a leading political party.
"Because for everybody else, the only part they see is inflation. And that leads to problems in the streets."
As with a lot of the U.S.-led postwar effort, steps on the labor front were organized upon arrival. When U.S. forces reached Baghdad in April, no one even knew where to find the Labor Ministry on a map.
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