The government would loose income . All of these employers have had layoffs or late paychecks during the period after the overthrow of Saddam.
Because that countrys main industry is oil ,I wonder how many people there have no relations that depend on the oil industry at all.
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Most of the best paying jobs were performed by members of the Ba'ath Party, and many of these were arrested and thrown out when the Americans arrived, during the de-Baathification period.
I imagine that there are a lot more people involved in commerce, education and other service jobs than in petroleum. The oil business is not job-intensive, certainly nothing like coal mining. A hole is drilled, the pump is put in pace, and since it runs on the same stuff it is pumping, it just sits there and bobs up and down, with very little human intervention for weeks on end. Maybe someone pops by once a week to siphon off some condensate or something, but it has been an automated operation for the past fifty years.
Oil extraction is labor intensive when they are setting up a derrick, drilling the well, hooking stuff up. Check out the number of cars in a refinery parking lot sometime: not too many. Refining is also largely automated.
