Iraq has finally issued a labour law that complies with International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions, up to a point. It is a good day for global justice.

The law provides legal protection for organised workers in the private and cooperative sector against unethical practices of local and foreign employers. It provides collective bargaining and it provides workers with continuous retraining to enhance their chances of getting jobs. And it provides foreign workers who are employed in the private and cooperative industries with legal and trade union representations.

The new labour law is against discrimination on the basis of age, gender, colour, race and ethnicity. The law also prohibits child labour in Iraq, and therefore, it meets several of the core conventions of the ILO.

But not all of them.

The new law aims to organise legally and constitutionally the industrial relationship between the state, business and workers – but it denies legal trade union representation and membership to millions of blue-collar public sector workers, including those employed by the state in the oil and gas, port and railway, public road transportation and communication industries and state municipalities.

The law also denies trade union pluralism: the Iraqi state recognises only one national trade union centre, only one teachers’ union and only one union for each sector. Pluralism is prohibited, despite being guaranteed by Iraq’s 2005 democratic constitution.