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/MAY DAY/IRAN: Labour Week After a Year Without Pay
By Ramin Mostaghim
TEHERAN, Apr 23 (IPS) - Karamat Aqaee was laid off work as an accountant
from the Ahvaz Steel Company in Khozestan in the south of Iran eight years
ago. His views were found to be incompatible with the ideology of the Islamic
government.
Aqaee, 51, has earned some money since then teaching mathematics. It
helped that his wife did not share his views, because she kept her job in the
education ministry.
Not everyone loses a job because of political views, but many work informally
as Aqaee does.
Official statistics, now seven years old, indicate that 12 million people in Iran
are employed in a population of 65 million. Many of these do informal jobs like
selling ration coupons, making a living through unofficial transportation, tutoring
as Aqee does, hawking goods on pavements, delivering snacks and groceries,
or working as middlemen in the black market. There are no unions to speak for
these workers.
Where there are, things have hardly been better. Iran does not celebrate
Labour Day alone but Labour Week culminating in May Day rallies that
sometimes run out of control. Once again, workers are protesting in many areas.
In Behshahr town in Mazandaran province about 150 km northwest of
Teheran thousands of workers have begun to take to the streets already to
demand wages that some have not received for more than a year.
"About 10,000 textile workers and their supporters have brought the town
almost to a standstill," says Esmaeel Mohammad Vali, a staff writer with the daily
Karo Karegar (Labour and Labourers). "If the protest goes out of control, the
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei will instruct the President's office to pay
their arrears from a special budget to tackle the crisis."
If such a situation arises elsewhere, "we will have to wait for another
spontaneous uprising of workers," Vali says. In several cases where the
government has intervened when a private or government-owned company has
gone bankrupt, workers have got little and "the rest of the money has gone into
the pockets of the new owners."
The cause of these workers is being taken up now by Karo Karegar and by
ILNA (Iranian Labour News Agency). The monthly magazine Andisheh Kar
(Labour of Thought) is trying to propagate Marxist theories. The writers for the
magazine include Prof Shapour Lavasani, a retired German-speaking
sociologist.
"About 600 factories across the country have not paid their workers for
between three and 20 months," member of parliament, and secretary of the
semi-official House of Labour Alireza Mahjob said earlier this week. He asked
for the setting up of "independent councils of workers". He argued that this is a
requirement of the Islamic constitution. But many are not certain what these
independent councils of workers are intended to be.
Those speaking for workers have to deal with the government, which is the
biggest employer. "With 85 per cent of the economy in government control, and
with more than 60 per cent of the work force employed by the government, it
goes without saying that increasing wages is not in the interest of the
government," Dr Hadi Ghanimifard, chairman of the Mine and Industry House
says in an interview with ILNA.
Members of a labour committee appointed by the Supreme Centre of Islamic
Labour Councils determine a minimum monthly wage every year. This year it is
85,000 Rials (100 dollars). But in small businesses that employ less than ten
persons and where social security is not mandatory, workers are often paid less.
Ziba Khani, 20, is divorced and is looking for a secretarial job. "If I ever fill in
85,000 Rials as the minimum salary I want, I am sure I will never get the job
because others are willing to do it for far less," she says.
For many in the private sector, privatisation means personalisation, critics say.
Unemployment stands officially at 16 per cent, but underemployment is
rampant, says economist Dr Fariborz Raiesdana. (END/2003)
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