In October 2003, prior to its founding assembly, a delegation from U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) went to Baghdad to meet with Iraqi trade unionists and tour union workplaces—the first postwar international labor delegation to go to Iraq. Delegates learned that unions have had an important history in 20th-century Iraq, starting with the oil, railroad, and dock workers’ unions that formed in the 1930s as British colonialists began developing an infrastructure to exploit and develop Iraq’s oil industry.