Introduction
“When it came to issues such as salary shortages or safety in the workplace, we were told to be patient and tolerant,”Footnote 1 said an industrial worker who shared his memories of the Worker's House, the 1979 Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War and its consequences with the journal Andisheh-ye Jāmʿeh. His experience is emblematic of a crucial feature of the Islamic Republic of Iran's (IRI) strategy toward workers: keep them waiting. On the one hand, starting in 1979 and throughout the years, labor was framed differently by the IRI's dominant narrative. Depending on the political agenda, discourses on workers—considered as a fundamental audience for the continuation of the status quo—were adjusted from time to time.Footnote 2 On the other hand, from the founding of the IRI by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to populist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's era in the late 2000s, workers were encouraged to resist, to wait, to keep struggling for the nation, and to be patient with regard to their own demands.
This article aims at investigating more in-depth, and from a workers’ perspective, the historical and political processes where discontent had its roots. It explores ruptures and transformations in the processes of resistance performed by Iranian workers between two key moments of upheaval in contemporary Iranian history: the 1979 Revolution and the 2009 Green Movement. The Iranian Revolution would not have been successful without the workers’ mobilization that paralyzed the Shah's economic apparatus. Almost twelve years later, between 1991 and 1995, the Islamic Republic had to cope with repeated unrest over jobs, housing, and inflation during the so-called “reconstruction” period (sāzandegi), which followed the eight-year war with Iraq. In 2005 and 2006, bus drivers organized in a new, independent (but not officially recognized) union took to the streets and demanded higher salaries before being harshly repressed. And in June 2009, the second re-election of populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad triggered a new wave of agitations. While some young activists called for a universal strike, workers as a cohesive and distinct group did not respond, with some labor activists labelling the Green Movement's participants as “narrow-minded liberals.”Footnote 3
Relying on an analysis of newspapers, website reports, and interviews conducted in Iran, this article explores expressions of workers’ agency as well as emerging political subjects during the thirty-year period. It also investigates the context, focusing on the changing dynamics within society and the top-down mechanisms of repression. Examining shifting conditions for dissent is, in fact, crucial for understanding how individuals choose to engage in actions and which methods they opt for, either formal or informal.Footnote 4 Therefore, this article contributes to the understanding of workers’ shifting role and attempts at collective mobilization under the complex apparatus of the Islamic Republic. In particular, it evolves from the existing literature on labor activism in Iran, as it specifically problematizes the bottom-up responses to top-down discourses and coercion, as well as the influencing social factors that led to the reconfiguration of new paths of resistance.Footnote 5 The argument proposed here is two-fold. While the IRI's narrative promoted neoliberal reforms and the “myth of the winner,”Footnote 6 starting in the 1990s, workers as a collective entity were gradually fragmented, weakened, precarized, and eventually marginalized as political actors. Concurrently, workers found alternative approaches for political mobilization. First, they managed to navigate authoritarian constraints by fluctuating from formal to informal activism. Second, they diversified their actions by using both online and offline spaces.
The politics of resistance
Looking at the Iranian context through a Foucauldian lens, resistance can be seen as eluding power, which represents its direct adversary within a framework of shifting relations. If—as Michel Foucault suggested—“power comes from everywhere” in the social bodyFootnote 7 and “where there is power, there is resistance,”Footnote 8 one may argue that the politics of resistance builds on this set of continuous interchange and relations between political actors. Following this line of reasoning, while the outcome might depend on changing conditions, there is always a possibility of resistance. Yet, there is a crucial point to consider. By producing rituals of truth, by that narratives meant to generate positive knowledge, several sources of power work to maximize the productive nature of subjects in order to decrease their resistive potential.Footnote 9 The politics of resistance also involves “the path of imagination,” such as the daily narratives that construct the meanings of power and resistance.Footnote 10 Actors, such as the Iranian workers considered in this article, decide to mobilize when patterns of political opportunity transform and new sites for struggle unwrap within power relations. As Foucault argued, “We're never trapped by power: it's always possible to modify its hold, in determined conditions and following a precise strategy.”Footnote 11
What are the strategies employed in the Iranian context? How did workers determine their paths of defiance? In order to understand the inner dynamics of resistance against perceived constraints, this article focuses on the methods and expressions of dissent that may mutate over time and space. For instance, public spaces became, from time to time, places for contesting a source of power, such as the state. Streets, perceived as extended symbols of the authorities, were turned into sites of protest and strike, with the aim of renegotiating new spaces of expression. As Foucault suggested, it is more fruitful to examine resistance in terms of opposition to different forms of power, without perceiving power as monolithic in nature and fixed to the authority, thus meaning one omnipotent actor. A closer look shows that the inherent essence of the Islamic Republic presents several sources of power in the state apparatus itself, from the dual leadership president–supreme leaderFootnote 12 to the different actors within the decision-making process (Parliament, Assembly of Experts, Council of Guardians, Expediency Council), and in the hierarchy of national security keepers (Security Council, Regular Army, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ministry of Intelligence and Security).Footnote 13 Furthermore, there are a series of agents that exercise social pressure and discourage activism beyond the state apparatus. These are represented by family, school, friends, and partners.Footnote 14 Therefore, the trajectories of activism are profoundly linked to all these dimensions, as forms of control are enacted both by the authoritarian state and society. Indeed, the effects reverberating from top-down narratives intertwine with discourses of morality/liberalism, safety, or coercion spreading from the whole social body. Eventually, as will be argued later, they can influence potential activists and discourage collective actions.Footnote 15
Collective actions and counter-conduct: paths of defiance
What gives impetus to collective actions? In trying to answer this question, another arises. How is it possible to distinguish a social force from a collectivity? The awareness of its members is fundamental. According to Antonio Gramsci, this distinction constitutes a demarcation line comprehending those who act politically and play a decisive role instead of waiting for better moments.Footnote 16 Thus, developing collective objectives means thinking in long-term goals, rather than relying on short-term individualism.Footnote 17 This is what Gramsci calls “awareness of duration,” which is to be “concrete and not abstract.”Footnote 18 Therefore, collective action becomes a tool to challenge domination. Through political action, workers in the context of this article can exercise power and they can perform an act of resistance.Footnote 19 Moving forward to a Foucauldian perspective from a Gramscian theoretical legacy, resistance erupts when power manifests itself as domination, even though power acts invisible anyway.Footnote 20 Moreover, as all forms of domination should be regarded as power, this does not mean that power always belongs to the domination sphere.Footnote 21 In Foucault's words, “In order for power relations to come into play, there must be at least a certain degree of freedom on both sides (…) This means that in power relations there is necessarily the possibility of resistance because if there were no possibility of resistance (of violent resistance, fight, deception, strategies capable of reversing the situation), there would be no power relations at all.”Footnote 22 Therefore, room for manœuvre constitutes a crucial element for organizing and developing coherent (collective) action. Gramsci argues that even when subjected to severe disciplinary pressure, people may be able to perform acts of contestation together.Footnote 23 How? Understanding the nature of the contestation makes it possible to track the inner dynamics and relations from which a shared political vision might develop over time. Furthermore, shifting historical and economic specificities are pivotal for explaining why particular forms of mobilization occur. In Foucault's words, it is necessary “to analyze an event according to the multiple processes which constitute it.”Footnote 24 For instance, in the context of this article, governmental power should be understood as “the way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed” and, consequently, not only as the “political structures or to the management of states.”Footnote 25 Far from neglecting the authoritarian core of the Islamic Republic and the strategies it uses, this approach makes it possible to demonstrate that those who are subject to these mechanisms can perform moments of counter-reaction. Hence, “the strategic codification of [disparate] points of resistance” leads to “great radical ruptures and massive binary divisions.”Footnote 26 The Foucauldian notion of counter-conduct, conceived as “the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price,” describes this process and sheds light on the relationship between a source of power and protests against it.Footnote 27 This is to say that practices of resistance and forms of government are mutually related and constitutive, and they can both undermine and boost each other.Footnote 28 Moreover, the notion of counter-conduct not only provides a grasp of how subjects of struggle subvert crystallized discourse and categories, such as the “good” worker or the “poor.” It also illustrates how new subjectivities are (inter)dependent on certain mentalities of discourse and government, but while resisting, they can reinforce the practices they react to.
How workers emerged as revolutionaries in 1978–1979 and consolidated in the 1980s
In unity with the fighting people of Iran, the purpose of our strike is to destroy despotism and eliminate the influence of foreigners on our country, and create an independent, free and progressive Iran. These goals are the indisputable rights of the people. The people shall utilize all the means of self-sacrifice to achieve these goals.Footnote 29
It was the end of 1978. With these words, the Common Syndicate for The Employees of the Iranian Oil Industry publicly declared its participation in the popular movement that led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the overthrow of the Shah. Workers called for self-determination and independence from foreign interference and meddling in Iranian domestic affairs. They announced their support for the “fighting people of Iran,” and revealed their tools and strategies for engaging in a struggle against “despotism.” Therefore, “all the means of self-sacrifice” were accepted. The factory was turning into a site for collective action. How did forms of collective awareness develop? Until June 1978, workers had mostly been far from street protests, the city of Tabriz being the only exception. But by summer, the recession was at its height. The Shah canceled annual bonuses and blocked wage increases. In reaction, the number of marchers rose sharply from tens of thousands of people to hundreds of thousands.Footnote 30 They joined protesters from universities, bazaars, and seminaries. Workers, mainly from oil, construction, and manufacturing factories, stopped their activities and took to the streets. Initially, there were strikes at the electrical and water systems in Tehran. Progressively, laborers in other cities, such as Abadan, Behshahr, Tabriz, and Ahvaz joined their colleagues. They demanded the reactivation of annual bonuses, better wages and housing, and health insurance. Violent repression by the regime disrupted demonstrations in Mashad, then in Qom and in Shiraz during the holy month of Ramadan while Isfahan saw bloody clashes.Footnote 31
Nevertheless, workers continued to join the revolutionary body, which was comprised of diverse and heterogeneous forces. As historian Ervand Abrahamian noted, if “the traditional middle class (merchants and clergy men) provided the opposition with a nationwide organization, it was the modern middle class that sparked off the Revolution, fueled it, and struck the final blows,” and “the urban working class” constituted “its chief battering ram.”Footnote 32 Workers became distinguishable from the other groups against the Shah and relevant to socio-political order developments. First, they had their own specific grievances: demanding higher wages, better housing conditions and medical insurance, and decrying mounting inflation. Second, their participation was crucial to the outcome of the revolution, since they economically “paralyzed the state apparatus” together with white-collar employees.Footnote 33 Oil workers played a particular role, initially disorienting and later fiercely undermining the basis of Shah's regime.Footnote 34 They controlled de facto Iran's vital economic resource and already had a shared, politically-driven experience from previous strikes and the historical legacy of the Left.Footnote 35 By taking to the streets and through collective mobilization, workers became conscious of their common condition and aware of their impact on the outcomes of the social and productive processes that they activated.Footnote 36
Religion was not the trigger for workers’ protests.Footnote 37 Rather, Khomeini's followers within the factories, in the past more closely aligned to Marxist groups,Footnote 38 were attracted by his “anti-despotic, anti-imperialist”Footnote 39 positions against the Shah and his awareness of most Iranians’ declining living standards.Footnote 40 As one worker told an American journalist, “We want Khomeini. He will take power from the rich and give it to us.”Footnote 41 Another reportedly said that Khomeini, “has brought the eyes of the world on our problem here and made them see that the Shah is a puppet of the foreigners who are stealing our money.”Footnote 42 Thus, in the last phase of the revolution, part of the labor movement adopted the Khomeinist discourse, shouting rallying-cries such as, “The dark night of the people will turn into day. Khomeini will eventually win,” “Long live the champion workers,”Footnote 43 “Hussein is our guide, Khomeini is our leader,” “Independence, freedom, Islam,” and “The Shah is a bastard.”Footnote 44 Furthermore, secular slogans and symbols about class struggle, social justice, and the fight against imperialism, such as “Islam will eliminate class differences,” “Islam is for equality and social justice,” and “The problems of the East comes from the West, especially from American imperialism,”Footnote 45 were absorbed into the Khomeinist discourse. The assimilation of secular rhetoric was Khomeini's specific plan of action at any level of power, aimed at nullifying leftist, secular groups within the anti-Shah movement.Footnote 46 The Marxist slogan, “Workers of the world, unite!” was turned into “Oppressed of the world, unite.” Laborers’ discontent, weak at forging its own safe channels for organizing, was engulfed into Khomeini's discourse for the masses of mostazʿafin, the oppressed. In Asef Bayat's words, this process left the historical Left befuddled. “Not only the working class, but also the traditional Left became confused by the populist, ‘anti-capitalist’, and ‘pro-downtrodden’ stance of the Islamic state.”Footnote 47
A mentality of struggle gradually emerged among those who wanted to unite, despite a particularly fragmented labor force. Organized workers’ movements with long-term, strategic goals were hindered by the small size of the nation-wide industrial enterprises. About 89 percent (6,738 factories) had less than one hundred employees, and 4,628 enterprises had less than nineteen workers.Footnote 48 In fact, at the beginning, workers did not express political concerns or demands.Footnote 49 When industrial strikes initiated the large workers’ upheaval, economic disruptions in the country started as well.Footnote 50 As a result, their role became central to undermining the Shah's regime, as oil workers explained:
Both the government and Iranian Oil Company officials suddenly realized that we were serious about the demands we had been putting forward from the start: end martial law, full solidarity and cooperation with the striking teachers, and unconditional release of all political prisoners. Our economic demands included “Iranianization” of the oil industry, all communications to be in the Persian language, and for all foreign employees to leave the country.Footnote 51
In the summer of 1979, owners fled abroad and many factories were nationalized.Footnote 52 The revolution was accomplished, but a power vacuum was left in the industrial sectors of the country. The only surviving organization were the workers’ councils, Showrāhā, established in many factories after 1978 as a strike committee with a strong, bottom-up management approach.Footnote 53 Mobilization had led to a phase of control from below. Although at the beginning workers were protesting to achieve economic gains, month after month, they built a network of members who were conscious of their political role and goals. As a solution for the crisis in productivity in industry, the new ruling bloc promoted labor as a religious duty.Footnote 54 The idea of control from below in the factory began to vanish, as the Khomeinists started “purifying” labor activities from leftist slogans and symbols. By 1981, most of the secular workers’ councils were disbanded. Gradually, workers’ “control from below” disappeared under the Islamic Republic's discourse of “power from above.”Footnote 55 Step-by-step, a slow process of “deproletarianization of labor”Footnote 56 was carried out and a purge of opponents started. Between 1981 and 1983, many workers’ councils activists were arrested, and about six hundred were killed. Workers’ councils were replaced by the state-controlled Showrā-ye Eslāmi, Islamic Labor Council,Footnote 57 and the Khāneh-ye Kārgar Worker's House. The religious transformation of Iranian factories was put into practice by members of the Islamic Associations (IAs) for Labor, which were supported by the Islamic Republican Party in power. The IAs were established for educational and social purposes, as mandated by the Iranian constitution, but soon became instruments of control over workers.Footnote 58 Meanwhile, the war with Iraq (1980–1988) had broken out and its effects became visible: a call for patience spread within the factory. As one labor activist remembered:
When [workers] raised the issue of wages, safety in the factory or surveillance, most of the times the advice of the Khāneh-ye Kārgar's officials was to be patient and tolerant, because the pressure of power of capital was kept hidden from workers’ eyes by certain managers and workers’ nomination for leadership was [actually] threatened. The war [with Iraq] imposed patience and tolerance in relation to strikes and any other action [harekat] was made difficult, along with the lack of clever leadership in the factory. Some forms of resistance [moqāvamat] were [still] possible and some of the demands considered, but eventually it was repression [sarkub] and there was no collective support [hemāyat jāmʿeh]. The Khāneh-ye Kārgar had imposed passivity towards power and so undermined collective activity.Footnote 59
While Khomeini was spreading social justice messages and praising workers as “holy warriors,” relations between the state management of the factories and workers transformed. Laborers’ right to organize in independent unions was denied, beyond the councils under the Worker's House umbrella. As a process of “sanitization of labor activism”Footnote 60 occurred and Islamic populism and nationalist discoursesFootnote 61 sought to engulf workers’ needs, spaces for dissent and collective actions were swept out.
Since 1985, “the Ministry of Labor is required to work in units with more than 35 permanent employees that are allowed to form the Islamic Labor Council.” Footnote 62 An oil worker said:
Even when someone is elected as workers’ representative, the managers of the contract firm put strong pressure on him through various ways, such as postponement of paying his wages or fringe benefits threatening him with changing his workplace, and dismissing him, so that he is forced to either resign or stay quiet. Footnote 63
The Worker's House and its members established a direct connection with the IRI's apparatus, receiving financial and logistical support:
The Khāneh-ye Kārgar after the Revolution gradually turned into a state union or the governmental reign of labor. It receives money and help from the Islamic Republic. Their members and leaders are with the system, not with workers.Footnote 64
Therefore, a combination of factors undermined organized labor activism: militant opponents’ repression, co-optation of workers in the new Islamic councils and Worker's House, and discourse assimilating social justice slogans and leftist symbols under the religious/Islamic umbrella. Throughout the 1980s, especially with the escalation of the war with Iraq, the chance for collective actions within and outside the factories declined. Under these conditions—once the IRI consolidated its institutional power—spontaneous labor mobilization and independent workers groups had very little space to flourish without being controlled, isolated, and repressed.Footnote 65
Negotiating spaces for struggle against liberalization policies in the 1990s
How did labor activists and workers’ expressions of dissent manage to develop and survive, despite this situation? Is repression a definitive obstacle to prevent mobilizations? As shown, circulation of positive discourses among the whole social body and co-optation of workers within key institutions in the factory, such as Islamic councils or the Worker's House, contributed to fragmenting laborers’ cohesion. The history of the Islamic Republic during the sāzandegi period, the reconstruction of the country after eight years of war, demonstrated that sources of power were mutually constitutive, and that room for resistance existed even under repression. Yet forms of dissent expression varied, as formal and independent networks of workers had already been disintegrated. During Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's presidency (1989–1997), manifestations of popular defiance and expressions of workers’ dissent intensified. Liberalization policies, elimination of subsidies, raising inequalities, and high inflation with a consequent drop in wages led to rapid deterioration in the country's economic situation. While the top-down discourse followed a mantra of production, shifting its focus from the masses to the new middle classes, laborers and the lower strata of Iranian society were left behind.Footnote 66 Before workers raised their voices as a specific and distinguishable social group, thus collectively in a Gramscian sense, the masses of oppressed and urban poor took to the streets. Embryonic forms of resistance manifested due to economic pressure. Illegal shanties in city suburbs—the fruit of rapid urbanization of the country in the decade after the revolution—were the breeding ground for discontent. In 1991 and 1992, rebellion manifested all over the country, in South Tehran, Shiraz, Mashad, Khoramabad, and Arak. Rioters expressed their frustration for days, throwing stones and setting police cars and buses on fire, Shiraz experienced a violent, one-day protest in March 1992, initiated by war veterans complaining about “lousy” management at the Foundation of the Dispossessed. Squatters joined the riots and two people died. Two months later in the industrial city of Arak, a riot broke out after a municipality pickup struck and killed a young boy while trying to remove a dump truck. It turned into three thousand people marching against the mayor.Footnote 67 A few days later the religious city of Mashhad became a battleground after squatters resisted the destruction of their dwellings. The small unrest grew into a big crowd. Once again, the police harshly repressed the mobilization.Footnote 68 These protests were deemed “the most serious urban disturbances in 12 years.”Footnote 69 A witness of Mashhad protests commented:
The state insists on calling these people enemies of the Revolution. Men, women and children who are economically much worse off than they were 10 years ago, they are not going to go away if we deny that they have problems.Footnote 70
The causes for defiance were mainly economic and not politically driven by a specific group or network. Images of the riots were broadcast on national TV, showing a massive police deployment. Protestors were portrayed as violent agitators threatening the IRI's security. Yet new sites for struggle were unfolding within the power relations. Impoverished daily workers and street vendors joined the protests occurring in Islamshahr, in the suburbs of Tehran, where more than five hundred thousand people lived in illegal settlements. When water supplies grew scarce and transport tickets prices arose, two hundred young boys started the protests. Within a few hours, the crowd grew to fifty thousand people calling for better living conditions and blaming the IRI for food shortages and inflation. The mostazʿafin raised their voices once again. Under the shifting economic conditions, opportunities for acts of contestation manifested. Yet these riots did not show particular awareness of duration, regarding the protesters’ grievances or goals. Fuel prices had soared, bus fares prices had almost doubled.
Early one morning, workers from a nearby shantytown en route to Tehran revolted. They marched to the bigger town of Islamshahr, picking up jobless supporters, smashing storefront windows, and setting fire to banks, gas stations and government buildings along the way.Footnote 71
Most of the people taking to the streets were jobless. They chanted that they had nothing to lose. Tehran state radio spread the news about a crowd assembled against water shortages. The rioters were called “agitators” to minimize their demands. Police opened fire on protesters:
Agitators among them attacked vehicles, public transport and other facilities, causing damage (…) With the intervention of security forces, several agitators were arrested and handed over to the judicial authorities.Footnote 72
Concurrently, discontent mounted within the factories. In addition to the repression, the legal conditions were not fully satisfying for workers. The Labor Law (ratified in 1989 and finally approved in November 1990) provided for written or oral contracts, which started paving the way for blank-signed contracts.Footnote 73 The space for bargaining power was reserved only for Islamic Labor Councils and workers’ representatives (and later to Guild Societies), which were all functioning under the Worker House's umbrella. Interestingly enough, the Worker's House was not specifically mentioned in the Labor Law. Yet, free independent unions had no right to exist beyond it. Furthermore, for the first time since the revolution, the IRI drew up temporary contracts. This policy granted greater power to employers, who were able to hire and fire employees more easily. Initially, workers expressed economic grievances, which rapidly became more political and collectively shared. Nonetheless these demands remained weak and could not flourish due both to repression and lack of support from the Worker's House.Footnote 74
Workers started to chart their own the “paths of imagination,” such as the daily narratives constructing the meaning of power and resistance previously mentioned in this article. Overdue payments and short contracts were at the core of the strikes. In 1995, workers from Khalifeh Abad in the northern province of Gilan, went on strike for the fourth time in less than a year. They started with a sit-in in front of the Asalam Lumber factory, asking for their salaries, which they had not received for two months. Then they blocked the Anzali-Hashtpar road for hours. That same year, Khavar Benz's factory workers went on strike demanding rights and greater bargaining power. A statement published online by workers described a bleak economic situation for the Islamic Republic:
The regime's critical economic state has stagnated Iranian factory production. Most of the factories operate at 20% of their capacity. Workers routinely do not receive their salaries for several months. Presently 16 million workers are either unemployed or laid off from their jobs.Footnote 75
Nearly a year later in December 1996, oil workers at refineries in Tehran, Shiraz, Tabriz, and Esfahan organized a two-day strike. They left their factories and for the first time since the revolution and took to the streets with structured political demands. The strike was the main headline in Kār, the magazine of Fedayān (Minority), which reported extensively on workers’ frustration with Worker's House activities to monitor potential sources of dissent. It also analyzed the roots of workers’ dissatisfaction, originating from the lack of collective bargaining rights within the refineries.Footnote 76 Two months later, the same workers organized a sit-in in front of the Oil Ministry, protesting the arrest of labor leaders. The security forces repressed the demonstration.Footnote 77 A statement from the Committee for the Defense and Support of Iranian Workers described a “direct confrontation” between the workers and the regime, with clear political contours:
The oil workers are involved in a direct confrontation with the Iranian regime. They are protesting against their working conditions, the level of wages and for the right to form a workers’ organization. Up to now the regime which governs Iran has refused to accept these basic demands. The oil workers had previously threatened to go on an all-out national, unlimited strike if their legitimate demands are not met.Footnote 78
Eighteen years after the revolution, workers finally had the opportunity to reconstruct collective actions, as they kept trying to form independent unions. As previously discussed through a Gramscian lens, even when subjected to severe repression, workers were seeking to perform acts of collective contestation.
On 5 and 6 February, they [workers] elected representatives who then went to Tehran to form a national organization. This organization met there on February 7, but the Iranian government intervened and dissolved the meeting. It then forced the representatives to return to their respective cities and prohibited them from leaving them, putting them under “city” arrest.Footnote 79
Yet, the response from the IRI was no permission granted:
The government has declared all oil workers’ organizations illegal, prohibited the formation of a national organization and refused the collective bargaining demand.Footnote 80
As inequalities increased, workers continued to demand higher wages. In September 1997, workers in Arak protested for better salaries at a machinery factory. Beyond repression, the state's need to cope with these continuous demands and strikes compelled the Labor minister to eventually intervene, declaring, “The workers’ main grievance is an increase of their pay. This should be pursued through legal channels.”Footnote 81
While oil workers were making a breach in the wall of Iranian public debate over labor rights, the gap between social classes and between generations was widening. As the neoliberal policies promoted by Rafsanjani were spread across the country, a new middle class emerged. The themes of social justice and redistribution of wealth were abandoned in official May Day speeches.Footnote 82 The new middle class began to reproduce its self-understanding of “the successful entrepreneur” as a social model. Throughout the 1990s, the Rafsanjani's government promoted privatization and neoliberal policies to solve Iran's economic problems. This line of reasoning followed a trend in liberal ideas, spreading particularly among upper middle-class Iranians, who believed that these policies would pave the way for democracy.Footnote 83 Among lower classes and youth, refusal of poverty and a rejection of the label of “lower/working class members” circulated. Slogans championing social justice and ideology were gradually robbed of their significance, as society began to perceive them as associated with the IRI's propaganda.Footnote 84
Resisting precarity and isolation in the Reformist era (1997–2005)
As part of the process of emptying the meanings of concepts such as ideology and modernity, as well as progress and redistribution of wealth, workers’ needs and demands were gradually overlooked. Both the government and a section of society dismissed them, whilst pursuing the cultural and intellectual opening offered by the newly-elected president, the reformist Mohammad Khatami. Meanwhile, workers were resisting both social isolation and the precarity/fragmentation created by temporary contracts and hiring agencies.Footnote 85 These measures threatened job security and collective bargaining in a particularly complex context.Footnote 86 Khatami's administration limited legal access to job security by exempting enterprises with five or fewer workers from the Labor Law coverage.Footnote 87 At the same time, it sought to open the space for participation and limited critique. In fact, his administration tried to reform, without success, chapter VII of the Labor Law on collective bargaining and workers’ organizations.Footnote 88
As the economic situation worsened, workers gradually exploited the greater—yet still limited —space for collective mobilization. In early January 1999, more than fifteen hundred workers from several factories organized an action in Kashan, demonstrating in front of the governor's office.Footnote 89 In addition to demands for higher salaries and overdue pay, between the late 1990s and early 2000s, workers’ political positions again took shape. They kept asking for their rights, raising their voices against temporary contracts and the expulsion of workers from factories. This was the case between February and April 1999, when oil workers gathered in Ahvaz, Abadan, and Shiraz. Sixteen were arrested. Similarly, in open conflict with the management were the Azmayesh factory workers in Sarvdasht who marched together in late May 1999.
As Rāh-e Kārgar reported:
Almost four hundred factories and manufacturing plants shut down in 1999 across the country.Footnote 91 Hence, unemployment presented a looming specter over laborers. Workers at Iran Khodro, one of the biggest car factories in the Middle East, went on strike demanding the elimination of temporary contracts from Labor Law, safer working conditions, and higher salaries for night shift jobs. They demonstrated for months.Footnote 92 In a statement, the workers declared:
In the early hours of 18th May 2005, a 30-year old worker in Assembly Section 4 of the Iran Khodro car plant was killed in a horrific accident involving a defective lift, while on a night shift. He was the 9th worker to die at Iran Khodro in the past two years due to the hazardous conditions at the plant. Lack of training, raised output targets, speedups, long hours (including forced overtime, weekend work and night-shifts), and the resulting overwork, are among the factors behind the deaths and injuries. Furthermore, more and more of Iran Khodro's workers –in line with the government and employers’ agenda nationally—are being forced to work under temporary contracts, for private contractors, with few or no rights.
The management's response to the workers’ protests over pay and conditions at Iran Khodro has been to bring in the factory's Security Organization (Harassat) to interrogate and detain dissident workers. In 2005, one of these workers, Parviz Salarvand, was taken away for questioning and kept in detention for nearly a month.Footnote 93
However, other social groups such as the middle class did not share their frustration or need to participate in the decision-making process in the workplace. As Behdad and Nomani wrote about Khatami's era and his allies:
Their potential advances were limited by their liberal economic position, prevailing unfriendly (and somewhat arrogant) attitude toward subordinate classes, and preference for a truncated, exclusionary brand of liberal democracy in the face of rising secularism across every social class.Footnote 94
Alongside this discourse spreading through society, crackdowns by the security forces decreased, but did not stop being used as a strategy by the IRI to suffocate protests. Nonetheless, workers managed to keep performing moments of counter-reaction to coercive measures, both in online and offline spaces. They benefited from little support from most of the reformist intellectuals. In fact, the rift between the so-called roshanfekrān [the “enlightened”] and workers broadened irremediably further, as the divide between rich and poor enlarged. Since the end of the 2000s, consumerist habits have converged with the rising inequality in the country. The desire for luxury—clothes, cars, houses, and dining in restaurants—permeated the upper-middle classes, particularly in the big cities.Footnote 95 The myth of the winner contrasted with that of the working man or woman, who were not models for youth anymore.Footnote 96 Working-class men remained trapped in their “precarious status.”Footnote 97 Yet as they had benefitted from the opening of relatively freer political space under Khatami, they did not renounce their struggle.
Coping with Ahmadinejad's crackdown: struggle, informal activism and the internet
When conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took the helm of a populist government in 2005, the IRI president claimed to speak again for the masses and lower classes. Conversely, his government repressed relatively open spaces for renegotiating workers’ activism. Nonetheless, workers found their own way to cope with the transformed political landscape. Labor activists responded to repression and arrests with sit-ins and other demonstrations. And they continued demanding room for dissent and the recognition of their rights. New, independent unions were born, such as the Tehran Bus Drivers Syndicate, the Haft Tapeh Sugar Factory Workers’ Union and the Free Union of Iranian Workers. When the state reaction began to be excessive, most workers decided to avoid contact with official networks. Forms of activism shifted from formal to informal groups, from organized unrest to individual participation, from semipublic to those online networks that had partly flourished during the reformist era.
Two interesting developments in labor activism occurred between 2004 and 2007, important attempts at official collective organization. The first one involved the United Bus Company of Tehran and Suburbs (Sherkat-e Vahed Otubusrani-ye Tehran va Humeh), usually referred as Sherkat-e Vahed, which was re-founded, after having been dismantled in 1983. Collectively organized, bus workers called for replacing Islamic Councils with independent trade unions. A semipublic meeting was organized in 2005 and nine thousand signatures were collected to found a new Syndicate. In September 2005, the bus drivers staged their first strike. In December, almost five thousand of them gathered together in downtown Tehran. Both actions faced harsh persecution. The organizers of the protests were arrested. The Syndicate president was jailed between 2006 and 2011 and the treasurer, Reza Shahabi, was kept in solitary confinement and charged with “conspiring” against the Islamic Republic. Moreover, according to labor activist Davoud Razavi in a piece published online, more than four hundred workers were arrested and three hundred were expelled from their workplaces because of their union activities.Footnote 98 He also added:
Decisions on the expulsion of the Syndicate's main members were taken at the highest level of the country's security authorities, and copy (proof) is available.Footnote 99
Yet, in an article published online in Persian, Said Torabian, a board member of Sherkat-e Vahed, dismissed repression as a tool to stop workers’ actions:
Members and the board of our syndicate believe that expulsion, unemployment, repression, arrest, and imprisonment are not convincing reasons to quit the struggle (…) Despite of all these problems there is still hope to change. What we experienced over the past few years for all our workers and activists and board members not only did not stop us, but represents also an incentive to continue our work and make further efforts to regain the lost rights of workers.Footnote 100
Following in the footsteps of Tehran's bus drivers, workers from the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Company in the southern region of Khuzestan, repeatedly went on strike in 2007. Although labor activists were arrested and jailed, twenty-five hundred workers signed a letter calling for the abolition of the Islamic Council and the establishment of an independent union. In November 2008, a second illegal trade union was established.Footnote 101 The Free Union of Iranian Workers took a similar path. Established between 2006 and 2008, one of its main goals was to gather together all expelled and unemployed workers. Although organizationally weak and harshly targeted by state police, it represented a significant collective experience during the battle to form an independent labor organization and diminish the Showrā-ye Eslāmi's control over workers.Footnote 102
Despite tough persecution, workers’ persistence led them to find new spaces where they could express their dissent. Labor Committees and new, independent unions commenced to move their activities online. Websites with news about labor activism and strikes around the country were opened, including Kargaran.org, Ehtehadchap.org, Jonbeshekargary.org, Iranlaborreport.org, and Gozaar.org. However, once they became too popular, the government would shut them down.Footnote 103 Informal and small networks flourished through email exchanges, blogs, and forums in order to keep labor activism alive. In the face of repression and concessions from the government, and even during and right after harsh suppression, ordinary people's and workers’ agency was not erased or nullified. What became routine under Ahmadinejad in particular was fear of being labeled as an activist.Footnote 104
Labor activism was already weakened and fragmented before the Green Movement took to the streets in 2009, in the most massive revolt since the 1979 Revolution with liberal requests for change (democracy and civil rights instead of social justice). Demands had changed: no social justice grievances or strong anti-imperialist rallying cries were chanted. Instead, the movement's main slogan was, “Where is my vote?” Workers’ demands had gradually been neglected and there was no tangible chance of them being manifested and shared within society at that moment. There were other reasons as well. There was harsh repression. More than 150 activists were arrested and jailed a month before the Green Wave erupted. At the same time, precarity reduced workers’ collective awareness and their will to look to long-term goals.Footnote 105 Additionally, there was the radical Left's reaction to the 2009 revolt, indeed, it dismissed the potential of the Green Movement as speaking for the liberal upper and middle classes and not for the masses.Footnote 106 Finally, most workers had evolved—as a result of aforementioned circumstances—to be activists on their own, in other words disconnected from formal networks or independent union firms. If formal activism was made illegal, informal groups were more difficult to track.
Conclusion
By adopting the workers’ perspective, this paper considered labor protests beyond the idea of an omnipotent state, without neglecting the IRI's inner dynamics and mechanisms for controlling dissent. Therefore, the analysis dealt with a fundamental question: As authoritarian regimes diversified and reinvented their response to several forms of organized and semi-organized expressions of dissent, how did labor activism change and manage to survive?
Over the thirty years between the revolution and the Green Movement, workers’ role within the society and as a distinguishable advocate for political change gradually weakened. It was first contained and suppressed from the top, and it was then profoundly overlooked and isolated within the whole society. Eventually, it became fragile, fragmented, and without long-term goals. In order to “precarize” and divide the workers, the IRI employed different strategies, which were both negative and “positive,” in other words, discursive in a Foucauldian understanding. It monitored, controlled, and repressed any form of independent defiance against the Khomeinist apparatus. While social justice and labor mobilizations were instrumental for the success of the revolution, throughout the 1980s labor was associated with Islam and fashioned as a religious duty. This positive discourse spread throughout society and merged several sources of power. As leftist symbols (perceived as dangerous for the stability of the IRI) were assimilated into a broader narrative pro-downtrodden and pro-masses, workers lost their specificity. Some workers identified themselves as revolutionary laborers and were co-opted through Islamic councils and Worker's Houses. Starting in the 1990s with the ratification of the Labor Law, workers were denied the right to organize in independent unions and temporary contracts were introduced. During the reformist era, workers did not represent the main audience for the IRI's discourse of progress.
Most academic research concentrates only on constraints and repression and depicts the IRI as an omnipotent entity. However, this methodology erases people's agency. In the workers’ case, it is worth reiterating the following key points. Perceived and/or experienced repression, both in the protests of the early 1990s and in the case of the Bus Drivers Union, did not deter workers from engaging in new activities. The strategies for performing acts of defiance transformed, together with the changing context. Starting in the mid-1990s, workers under temporary contracts did not have the opportunity or the time to strengthen their networks. As a result, most of the protests did not have long-term goals. The myth of success spreading within the social body as a model contrasted with the ideal of the working man or woman. Social justice demands were not shared by the new middle class flourishing in the 1990s. When public places were considered too dangerous, workers reinvented their ways to organize and opened websites, moving channels of resistance online. Beyond self-censorship, caused by certain social pressure, workers began to avoid formal activism in order not to be expelled from the workplaces or factories.
In conclusion, what emerged from a closer analysis of the trajectories of labor activism in Iran is a new subjectivity of worker/activist who is able to assess how “red lines” shift and more aware of which places to go or how to merge online and offline spaces. This new subject may lack formal connections and long-term goals, also being restrained by several sources of power within society (family, friends, colleagues) that can discourage acts of rebellion. In fact, activism and collective actions in Iran are continually described in terms of disorders and public security, as well as relegated to the realm of what is illegal, not only by state officers or supporters.
