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 workforce 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 laborer's markets, clutching the splintery, dented shovel he used in the Saddam era. "Now I do nothing but wait here until someone can hire me."
The unemployment problem contributes to and reflects Iraq's most vexing problems. It produces legions of idle and angry young men who 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 (hands) 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 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.
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.
"We must have visited 10 buildings before we found the right one," Otwell said.
The U.S.-led occupation authority has provided a limited infusion of jobs with 300,000 people hired for short-term work cleaning canals and trash, and with ongoing hiring for the new Iraqi security services to reach 220,000 people by the summer.
Despite calls in the United Nations and World Bank report for a campaign of "make-work schemes" in agriculture and reconstruction, the coalition instead chose to hand cash assistance to many of those out of work.
"We made a decision in May or June that while short-term (jobs) would have made people feel good, it would only have been a Band-Aid. We wanted to build a structure and create job growth, and it has taken this amount of time to make that happen," Otwell said.
Other U.S. policies added to the unemployment. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq, dissolved the 400,000-member Iraqi army, and at least 20,000 more Iraqis were fired from middle and senior management posts in a campaign to remove Baath Party members from authority.
The United States maintains the moves were necessary to close the book on the former regime. But many Iraqis disagree. They say firing the military unleashed a pool of seething young men, with, in some cases, little more than a one-time $40 severance payment.
"They should have embraced us," said Sami Abbas Darwish, 37, a former air force technician who, like others with enough rank, still receives a paycheck from the U.S.-led coalition. "Now, we do not have jobs and we are not respected by the people or the government. So in return, some people now have turned against the Americans."
The coalition says its long-term jobs plan will bear fruit soon. By the end of December, there are to be 11 training-and-employment centers across the country, with 17 more for next year. In the long run, coalition officials say, only a free economy can bring real jobs.
"It's like turning on a faucet; we've bought the pipes, we've connected the pipes. And now we're getting ready to turn it on in January," Otwell said.
On a street corner in the run-down East Gate neighborhood of Baghdad, 200 men jockey for attention from those who might be able to bestow jobs digging holes or burning trash worth $3.50 a day.
They surge toward a visitor to show their tools: trowels for drywall work, spindly metal rods for cleaning sewers, or just their ropy arms and worn hands. Many once worked building Saddam's many oversized mosques and monuments or at outmoded factory jobs. Asked about life in the new free economy, they complain about no work and unscrupulous employers.
"I worked to clear out a building at the Trade Ministry, and they promised to pay us after Eid," said Hassan Kareem, 24, referring to the recent Muslim holiday.
"But now it is after Eid, and they give us nothing," he added, before others shouted their stories as well.
But others turn away, back to the roar of passing cars, where they hope to catch the eye of anyone with work to give.