\t\t\t\tFrom The Economist<\/p>\n
DURING a Persian new year\u2019s party (in late March) at Iran\u2019s flagship South Pars project in the Persian Gulf, where the world\u2019s largest known gasfield is being tapped, a labourer called on Iran\u2019s workers to unite. Behnam Khodadadi demanded better pay and conditions, and a proper trade union. Around 1,500 workers stopped security guards from detaining Mr Khodadadi. A week later he was fired from his job at Iran Industrial Networks Development, a contractor for the state-owned National Iranian Oil Company. Mr Khodadadi may have been muzzled, but disaffection is growing among Iranian workers as inflation outpaces wage rises and workers are laid off. At the same time attempts to organise labour are being suppressed in the run-up to June\u2019s presidential elections.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey haven\u2019t paid us for at least four months and I have to keep borrowing money,\u201d says Jamshid, a 32-year-old industrial worker in Tehran, the capital. Last month the minimum wage was raised by 25%, to 4.87m rials ($140) a month, but even by official criteria this is one-third of what is deemed to be a living wage in the capital. The drop in the rial\u2019s value means that, when it comes to the imports on which Iran relies, Iranian cash is worth barely a third of what it was in 2011, before the United States imposed sanctions on the country\u2019s financial system.<\/p>\n
Iran does not recognise independent unions, so workers have to make do with Islamic Labour Councils, which must be approved by employers and the security services. Reckoning that these councils are in cahoots with the government, workers tend to keep their grievances to themselves for fear of being sacked as troublemakers. Labour leaders are often imprisoned.<\/p>\n
Ali Nejati and Reza Shahabi, who led sugarcane workers\u2019 and bus drivers\u2019 unions respectively, were recently freed under surveillance. Mr Shahabi is now in prison again, as is Muhammad Jarahi, who stands for petrochemical workers, and Shahrokh Zamani, a painter, all of them guilty of \u201cendangering national security\u201d. \u201cNot having independent workers\u2019 unions guarantees things will stay the same,\u201d Mr Nejati recently told an Iranian radio station based in Germany. \u201cAs a workers\u2019 representative I complained and I went to prison for it and was fired.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the long history of Iran\u2019s labour movement and the big part its oil workers played in deposing the shah in 1979, Iran\u2019s workers have witnessed a steady erosion of their bargaining power. After the revolution, independent workers\u2019 councils won rights to such things as a 40-hour week and lodging allowances. They got rid of people who had worked for the shah\u2019s intelligence service. But during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the unions\u2019 independence was destroyed. Under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his successor, Muhammad Khatami, imports soared while Iran\u2019s own manufacturing industry slumped. Unions have been further weakened by the reclassification of many workers as temporary.<\/p>\n
Last month several bakers were arrested for allegedly organising their colleagues in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj. At the same time, workers at a tractor-making company in Tabriz, in the north-west, signed a letter accusing managers of \u201cbrutal treatment, intimidation and failing to pay wages\u201d. \u201cAuthorities who always talk about justice in the Islamic republic should know that complete injustice prevails in this system,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are at the mercy of our employers,\u201d says Mahmud, a Tehran street sweeper on his night shift, scraping rubbish out of an open gutter with a coarse wicker brush. \u201cWe almost never get the overtime pay we are entitled to but we can\u2019t complain because we would be fired.\u201d A senior municipal worker admits that thousands of non-unionised street sweepers, who clean the capital by night, often go months without pay. Last year the office of Muhammad Qalibaf, Tehran\u2019s mayor and a presidential hopeful, commissioned a film called \u201cThose Who Wear Orange\u201d about a brainy university graduate who becomes a street cleaner\u2014for love of the job.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From The Economist DURING a Persian new year\u2019s party (in late March) at Iran\u2019s flagship South Pars project in the Persian Gulf, where the world\u2019s largest known gasfield is being tapped, a labourer called on Iran\u2019s workers to unite. Behnam Khodadadi demanded better pay and conditions, and a proper trade union. Around 1,500 workers stopped … <\/p>\n