* About 300 oil employees stage brief demonstration
* Protesters demand bonuses, threaten oil production halt
By Aref Mohammed
BASRA, Iraq, May 9 (Reuters) - About 300 Iraqi oil workers staged a brief walkout in the southern oil hub of Basra on Monday, protesting a lack of financial benefits and threatening to halt production at some fields if their demands were not met.
The demonstrators were engineers, technicians and workers at the state-run South Oil Co., which has some 18,000 employees developing some of Iraq's big oilfields. They protested for three hours at the company's headquarters in Basra and at another location near an oilfield west of the city.
They warned they could shut down production in some oilfields if they were not given financial bonuses similar to those given their peers working in fields that are being developed by international oil companies.
"If South Oil Company does not give us our rights of profits and bonuses, we will stop production," said Asaad Abu Hussein, an employee at SOC's field production department.
"Just because we are poor and our field was not developed by a foreign company like the rest of the oilfields, we are being treated unfairly," he said.
Basra, located about 420 km (260 miles) southeast of Baghdad in the centre of Iraq's main oil-producing region, has seen several demonstrations in recent months as protests inspired by uprisings across the Arab world have shaken Iraq's government.
Iraq signed a series of deals with international oil companies to boost its oil output capacity to 12 million bpd by 2017 from 2.7 million bpd now. At that level, it would vault into the upper echelon of global producers.
The demonstrators complained that SOC employees who were transferred to work in oilfields developed by foreign oil companies, such as BP, ExxonMobil and Italy's ENI, were getting better pay, annual bonuses and training.
"The company understands and is sympathetic with the demonstrators' demands because they are realistic," a senior official at SOC said on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorised to talk to the press.
"But it is the oil ministry that is responsible for calculating the bonuses and profits. The company (SOC) has nothing to do with this issue," he said.
(Writing by Suadad al-Salhy; editing by Rania El Gamal and Jane Baird)