Hadi never died: Hadi Saleh and the Iraqi trade unions

Abdullah Muhsin and Alan Johnson, TUC, 80 pages, paperback, £10

Hadi Saleh was murdered in 2005 for trying to organise an independent trade union movement in Iraq. His personal story of youthful activism, imprisonment and torture, of exile and finally of return to Iraq is also the story of the country's emerging labour movement.

The book is a tribute to Hadi Saleh, but to understand the man it must also explain the Iraqi trade union movement. It is a detailed account of trade unionism in Iraq before and during the Saddam period.

But most of all it is an account of efforts to organise new unions in Iraq since 2003. It contains reports of actual workplace struggles, of the arrest and imprisonment of trade unionists by occupation forces - and the murder of trade unionists by the "resistance". It also reviews efforts to demonstrate solidarity with Iraqi trade unionists and rightly insists that solidarity must continue.