By Paul Hampton
The recent teachers’ struggle in Iran is the latest visible sign of an independent labour movement emerging after 25 years of repression. This movement holds out the greatest hope — both for getting rid of the theocratic regime and winning some kind of democratic republic – but also for averting a terrible war in the region.
A new book, Iran on the brink, by Swedish journalists Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian chronicles the rise of a new independent workers’ movement in Iran. * The movement has grown despite the fact that independent unions are outlawed and strikes illegal. The regime of the “millionaire mullahs” stations military units at many large factories and uses its armed forces to repress workers struggles.
The movement began in January 2004. Construction workers building a copper-smelting plant near Khatonabad had been promised permanent employment, but just before copper production was due to begin, most were sacked.
The workers struck and sat-in for eight days, demanding the agreement be honoured. Special police fired live ammunition into the crowd from helicopters. Between 7 and 15 workers were killed, 300 were wounded and over 80 arrested and tortured. Khatonabad may have been a defeat, but it was followed by an increase in labour activism in Iran.
In March 2004, teachers entered the fray. A third of all teachers in the country heeded the call to strike by a dissident leader of the Islamic councils (in this case, called guilds), with 800 schools in Esfahan and 400 in Tehran shut down on the first day of action. Staff at medical sciences universities joined them, in what was probably the first female dominated strike action on a mass scale in Iranian history (80% of Iran’s teachers are women). The ‘guilds’ newspaper was closed down after publishing reports on the strike and the Ministry of Education refused to make any concessions.
On May Day 2004 workers across Iran planned to demonstrate in celebration of labour day. Textile workers, bakers, brick-makers and other workers in Saqqez set up a shora (workers’ council) to coordinate their activities. However when workers came out on the streets, they were viciously repressed. Nevertheless the marches signalled that workers were becoming more confident.
Underground workers’ committees were formed, often evolving out of hiking or other “clubs”. Workers’ bulletins, such as Karegar-e Pishro (Progressive Worker) Karegar-e Andishe (Worker’s Intellect) and Shora (Workers’ Council) began to circulate in factories.
One form of action that gained widespread popularity was to physically confront the mullahs. Workers’ collectives hire a caravan of buses, drive into Tehran and demonstrate in front of the Ministry of Labour, the Majles (parliament), the presidential office or even the office of the Ayatollah himself.
Advanced forms of organisation have been set up. Workers have formed independent shoras (workers’ councils) and in some places taken over production. During a strike in autumn 2004 at a brick mill near Tabriz, workers set up a shora — with 3,000 meeting in the desert to elect a strike committee.
At the Farshe Gilan carpet factory in 2004, the 600 mainly women workers, the majority of them women, were informed that the factory would be closed. When bulldozers came to tear it down, workers promptly sat down, blocked the bulldozers, and stayed on guard in shifts. Ten workers were elected to an executive committee. For three months, workers administered everything from orders to production and deliveries. They were forced to give in after the electricity company cut off power and the bank refused to give them loans.
The struggle picked up again in 2005. On May Day the government’s labour front Khane-ye Karegar called a rally at the Azadi stadium in Tehran. Around 20,000 workers gathered only to find the speaker was presidential candidate and Iran’s richest man Hashemi Rafsanjani. According to reports, people started booing and shouting “the government should leave us alone”, and “abolish slavery in Iran”. Rafsanjani’s speech was cancelled. Some activists stormed the podium and pulled down the microphone, while the masses in the stadium simply marched out.
The new mood was symbolised by workers at the Iran Khodro car plant in Tehran. Iran Khodro means “Iran moving by itself”. It is the largest car maker in the Middle East, employing 37,000 workers. In reality, the factory illustrates that workers are moving by themselves.
In January 2004 the car workers took strike action after the deaths of two young night shift workers from strokes. They also struck for job security, an end to temporary contracts and overtime pay for night-shift work. In May 2005, another young worker died in a nightshift accident. Repeated stoppages occurred, while workers’ committees circulated damning indictments against the “killers” who made “contract work the norm”.
One leaflet said: “We are certain that as long as the cost-cutting measures and subcontracting continue, we will have more such incidents. What does not count at all for the management is the expendable lives of us workers. If we protest, they arrest us in the name of ‘saboteurs’ or interrogate us on a daily basis.”
On 16 July 2005 the “day of social welfare and securities” was announced, with mass strikes coordinated in Bushehr, Yazd and Shushahr. Production came to a halt in Iran Khodro, 10,000 factory workers held a strike in Goldstan, 17,000 rallied in Ilam and the holy city of Qom was reduced to chaos when transport workers joined the strike. The event signalled a national convergence of demands.
According to Malm and Esmailian, there were 140 strikes in October 2005, followed by 120 in November alone. This compares with an estimated 46 cases in the twelve months from March 1998 to March 1999, followed by 41 from May 1999 to May 2000.
In December 2005, workers at Iran Khodro downed tools again and security guards marched through the assembly halls to find the instigators. In March 2006, after small bonuses were announced despite record production, production in one section was shut down with chants of “workers’ unity” and “death to the manager”.
The most high profile struggle has been the Tehran bus workers. In 2004 the 17,000 drivers of the Sherkat-e Vahed bus company began organising an independent union. On 9 May 2005 their office was stormed by hundreds of men from the government thugs wielding sticks and batons. The workers’ leader Mansour Ossanlou had his tongue and face cut, leaving him scarred and with a permanent lisp.
In defiance of road blockades and other assaults from the regime, the union’s assembly took place on 3 June 2005. A steering committee of 19 bus drivers was elected, a constitution adopted and the formation of an independent Sherkat-e Vahed union announced. Mansour Ossanlou was elected President.
The bus drivers demanded recognition of the union, introduction of collective bargaining, wage parity with other public sector workers (as a first step, a rise of £1 a day for lunch), two sets of winter and summer uniforms, two pairs of shoes, and an assistant for every driver to ease the stress of driving.
In September 2005 bus drivers drove with their lights on all day in protest against unpaid wages and in October they refused to take any fares from passengers.
Mansour Ossanlou and 14 other union members were arrested on 22 December 2005. Three days later thousands of Tehran bus drivers struck. When they returned to work, workers drove buses with posters of Ossanlou on their windscreens and banners stating “an independent union must be formed”. They announced a general strike of all bus lines in the capital, to take place on 28 January 2005. Over a thousand workers were rounded up as a result.
A big international solidarity campaign helped gain the release of most of the bus drivers. Ossanlou was held in the notorious Evin prison from December 2005 until August 2006. He was arrested again in November 2006 and released a month later. His trial began in February 2007. Around 50 of the bus workers have been dismissed for union activities.
This year, workers struggles have surged again. According to the Iranian Workers’ Bulletin (www.iranianworkersbulletin.org), textile workers, sugar workers, fridge makers and tile makers have all taken action over unpaid wages. On 30 January the Bushehr shipyard was shut down by about 150 workers who were protesting about the sacking their work mates and temporary contracts. The teachers’ struggle is only one part of a labour war waged against the theocratic state and the employers.
The economic drives behind this upsurge in class struggle are plain. The Iranian economy shrank in the 1980s and grew barely at all in the 1990s. However it took off in 2000 and has grown at 6-7% over the last five years. In particular the Iranian state has benefited from the rise in oil prices — and this revenue has been used to promote capital accumulation.
Oil now makes up 60-70% of state income, compared to 35% in 1998, leading Malm and Esmailian to suggest it is almost a rentier state.
Over half of Iran’s GDP is generated by companies owned by the state, including oil and gas, transport, telecommunications, industry, banking and finance. Then there is the Bonyad Mostazafin, the Islamic holding company, employing 700,000 workers and with interests in two thirds of all bricks, tyres, chemicals and foodstuffs in Iran. At the top sits the fabulously wealthy millionaire mullahs.
The oil money greases the wheels of actual capital accumulation. An import substitution strategy has generated new manufacturing companies. Manufacturing makes up a fifth of employment (and half a million are car workers), construction is up to a tenth (one million workers), service has increased slightly to two-fifths, the diminished share being agriculture. Women, whose share of the labour force plunged from 19% in 1976 to 9% in 1986, has risen to more than 15% — though mainly in the public sector.
However outside an oasis of large, well-nourished industrial enterprises, Iran’s economy is still to a large extent a desert of backwardness. The textile industry has failed to modernise; women still sew and weave in their homes. In other words, Iran illustrates exactly the kind of combined and uneven development described by Trotsky in Russia in the early part of the last century.
With around 65% of Iran’s 70 million people under 25 and official unemployment standing at 15%, there is huge pressure in the labour market.
For example in the South Pars natural gas field in the region of Assaluyeh (the largest in the world), approximately 70,000 workers work, “living in barns” and eating “photocopy bread”. They work no less than 10 hours a day “but sometimes as many as 12 or even 15 hours” under the supervision of military officials and foreign managers.
Employers have systematically failed to pay wages and with more than 50% of workers on temporary contracts, knowing the precarious nature of their conditions. Many workers take jobs as taxi drivers.
Even Alireza Mahjoub, secretary-general of the government labour front Khane-ye Karegar has admitted that, “close to 200,000 workers in 500 factories have not received any salary for months. Some of these workers have been waiting for their wages for about 50 months”.
According to the Iranian Central Bank, more than 50% live below the government’s designated poverty line and 15% of all Iranian children work.
Marx said that religion is the opium of the masses; in the theocratic state workers cope only by recourse to masses of opium. According to the UN World Drug Report in 2005, the Islamic Republic is the leader in per capita addiction to opiates and heroin; with 4 million addicts out of 70 million citizens. The official National Centre for Addiction Studies estimates that 20% of the adult population is “somehow involved in drug abuse”. Iran is also a world leader in suicide statistics.
Although a legal independent labour movement is outlawed, some national organisations have been formed.
The Komiteye Hamahangi (Coordinating Committee for Workers’ Organisation in Iran), constituted in late May 2005 is led by Mohsen Hakimi, one of the Saqqez Seven. He argues that “our most important task is to prepare the ground for workers’ councils to take over the country”.
Malm and Esmailian argue that this committee has “made a fetish of the shora institution” which Hakimi has “petrified into a doctrine of council communism”. They say it rejects any transitional steps or other organisational forms, declaring trade unions a “fundamental obstruction in the way of the working class struggle”. It apparently said the international demonstrations in support of the bus workers on 15 February 2006 were showing support for US policies towards Iran.
They are more complimentary about the Komiteye Peygiri (Follow-up Committee for the Establishment of Free Workers’ Organisations in Iran), which has roots in the Fedaiyan Majority and Tudeh (Communist) party. Mansour Ossanlou has been its most prominent leader.
Last month, the Co-operation Council of Labour Organisations and Activists Co-operation Committee (Komiteh-ye Hamkari) was founded, with both the Komiteye Hamahangi and Komiteye Peygiri, as well as student and writers organisations agreeing to create a “united action bloc” as a step towards working class unity in Iran.
Malm and Esmailian are dismissive of the “worker-communist” parties — for pretending to lead struggles despite “a tiny presence inside Iran” and for their “anti-Islamic harangues”.
From a distance, it is impossible to assess the strength or significance of these different currents. Clearly more effective organisation is necessary. But the first duty of socialists around the world is to support this marvellous mass movement of workers in Iran, which holds out the best hope for our politics in the region.
*Note: The book is divided into two parts — the first on the workers’ movement, and the second on Iran in geopolitics. The latter is notably weaker. The authors are journalists from the Arbetaren (The Worker), a weekly newspaper published by the anarcho-syndicalist union Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden. However their politics is marred by elements of kitsch-Trotskyism — particularly over Israel (“the Zionist entity” and the US’s “attack dog/mastiff”) — soft on Islamist “resistance” in Iraq and Lebanon, and ambiguous on the attitude of workers in the event of an attack on Iran. This detracts substantially from the useful first part of the book, where they appear to reject the classless “anti-imperialism” of idiots.
