“In that year [1953] a long night fell over the Iranian working class, a darkness from which it only began slowly to emerge after the passage of twenty years.”
—Fred Halliday Footnote 1The nationalization of Iran's oil epitomized the victorious peak of integrated action by the elites in the political decision-making process and the organized labor force in the fields and refineries. When this blissful moment was crushed by the military coup of 1953, the Iranian labor movement faced a radical change in the political climate. The years after the 1953 military coup in Iran constitute the consolidation of the monarchy. During this process, labor unions were outlawed, political opposition was suppressed, and, by 1957, SAVAK, the State Intelligence and Security Agency, had been founded. Approached as a matter of internal security, the labor issue was regulated by a new law in 1959 that permitted the registration of labor unions on the condition that they underwent surveillance by this intelligence organization. Based on these legal barriers to trade unionism, the suppression of political opposition by an increasingly authoritarian regime, and the lack of large-scale transformative collective action by workers in comparison to the periods immediately preceding the 1953 coup and the 1979 revolution, these years, the long 1960s, have been described in the historiography of Iran as the dark years of the labor movement.
Two of the most proficient historians of the modern history of Iran, Ervand Abrahamian and Fred Halliday, have called this period, respectively, an “interlude before an inevitable storm”Footnote 2 and “a long night” for the working class; in their work, these historians focus on state repression and/or the structural inabilities of the working class to engage in collective action.
Based on the particular case of oil workers in Iran, this article challenges that standard narrative in two ways. First, the assumption that the history of the working class is the same as the history of labor activism in this period needs to be addressed. Building upon discussions of the need to contextualize working-class struggles,Footnote 3 this article argues that a comprehensive study of working peoples should involve not only their political activism but also other factors that are influential in the working-class experience including, but not limited to, the composition of the working class, the relationship between the changes in the production process and workers’ lives, and the connection between macro level social and political changes in the country and the experiences of a specific group of workers. Being the most popular subject of Iranian history of the 1960s, the connection between the White Revolution and the lives of Iranian workers has not been studied beyond the level of providing an explanation for the “lack” of activism in the period. This article scrutinizes the impact of the centralized reform program known as the “White Revolution” on the lives of the Iranian working class of the 1960s in general and of oil workers in particular.
The second assumption to be discussed here is that labor activism is, by definition, transformative or antagonistic. Instead of explaining the lack of labor activism in Iran in the 1960s, I argue that workers did engage in collective action, albeit on a small scale, using different tactics and avoiding conflict. As a study of the collective actions of Iranian oil workers during the 1960s demonstrates, actions can have short life spans and be co-opted in the discursive ways they are articulated, but that does not mean they did not occur or were not successful.
The White Revolution beyond its Blueprints
If one aspect of the postcoup authoritarian regime was state suppression, the other was state reform. In this, the Iranian regime was in no way unique. As Charles Tilly argues, establishing the monopoly of violence, or state-making in a territory is only one of four central roles of the state, which also include war-making, protection and extraction, which, in turn, support state-making and vice versa.Footnote 4 The introduction by the Iranian monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, of the White Revolution of the 1960s or the “Shah and the People Revolution,” as he referred to it, should also be placed in this framework of the state's role of state-making, protection, and extraction. The balance sheet of the twenty years following the coup confirms once again that these roles are intertwined.
The 1960s were transformative years for Iran in terms of social and economic change. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was founded in 1960 with the participation of Iran, and oil revenues rose from $34 million in 1954–1955 to $5 billion in 1973–1974.Footnote 5 The GNP rose from $200 to $1,000 between 1963 and the late 1970s.Footnote 6 Industrialization proliferated by means of five-year development plans and was accompanied by a rapid wave of urbanization. While in 1966 only thirty-eight percent of the population lived in towns, the urban population reached forty-eight percent in 1976.Footnote 7 The improved living standards of a segment of the population did not only exemplify the state's success in protecting their welfare but also brought forth another kind of protection: that of the ruling strata from a red revolution from below.Footnote 8
These economic developments were soon followed by a top-down social reform program. Initiated as a six-point reform bill in 1962, the White Revolution involved nationalization of natural resources, privatization of state factories, land reform, introduction of a profit-sharing system, women's suffrage, and establishment of a literacy corps. These were later complemented with the introduction of health corps, development corps, and other additional reforms.
The rapidity of industrialization and land reform has been presented as factors leading to the birth of a new Iranian working class in the 1960s.Footnote 9 However, other aspects of the White Revolution have been set aside as irrelevant to the lives of workers. The impact of the new health and literacy corps on the lives of working people has been left unstudied, for example. But, if we are to understand labor history as the history of the working class, we must go beyond the history of work sites and institutionalized forms of action and focus on the totality of the working-class experience, which involves changes that affect workers’ lives outside the workplace as well as within it.Footnote 10 Moreover, these changes do not only take place in the realm of the material conditions of working people, but also in the cultural realm, and they do not necessarily reflect the consequences intended by blueprints for top-down reforms. Therefore, here, I will present some of the pillars of the reform program, whose impact have been widely discussed in the literature, namely the land reform program and the industrial profit-sharing scheme; the understudied pillars such as health and literacy corps; and the impact of the discourse carried along with the reform program and the cultural climate it gave birth to. I argue that it is the latter which was most influential in shaping the different kind of activism that prevailed during the long 1960s. The other aspects of the reform program, such as the extension of suffrage to women and the privatization of state factories, will not be discussed in this paper due to the lack of direct links between them and the particular case of oil workers, which is its focus. However, studying their impact on the lives of workers in other sectors would constitute an important contribution to the labor historiography of Iran.
Propagandized as abolishing feudalism in Iran, the land reform that began to be implemented in 1963 was meant to end the concentration of arable land in the hands of the few. The reform did weaken the power of the elites vis-à-vis the state; however, many landlords passed their villages to their close relatives, keeping the agribusinesses, mechanized farms, and plantations.Footnote 11 As Abrahamian argues, the land reform did provide some farmers with land, fertilizer, and cooperatives. But most peasants did not receive anything, which widened the gap between the landless peasants and the landed peasants to a further degree, despite the state's claims.Footnote 12
Reports from this period of Britain's Foreign Office and of the United States consul point to the ambiguity of the land reform's impact.Footnote 13 The main problems were the lack of proper registration of the properties in terms of boundary lines and ownership claims. Iranian farming involved big absentee landlords, independent farmers that worked their own land and employed workers, and farmhands who were employed by farmers or absentee landlords.Footnote 14 While independent farmers with small properties and those who worked for absentee landlords were entitled to land distribution, other landless farm workers did not receive any land as a result of the reforms and in most cases lost their jobs because of the agricultural crisis that was caused by the ambiguity of the situation of the land. Nikkie Keddie argues that about forty percent of the cultivating villagers were workers who were paid in cash or kind, or a combination of the two.Footnote 15 Land reform in Khuzestan, the heartland of the Iranian oil industry, was not immune to these ambiguities either. The US consul in Khoramshahr, Thomas Donovan, points to disputes between large land-owning families and their former tenants over entitlement to land distribution in Behbahan, an agricultural center of Khuzestan. It is argued that the disputes resulted from the lack of proper delineation of the lands and the absence of effectively organized cooperatives to direct and guide the farmers.Footnote 16 Donovan's reports discuss the farmers’ resorting to violence to keep farm workers away from the land.Footnote 17 Donovan explains that in Khuzestan two different farmers often worked the same land at different times of the year, and, in many cases, the land reform officials were presented with two legitimate claims for the same property. In cases of multiple claims to a piece of land, cultivation was often postponed until the dispute was settled. Moreover, in the case of Khuzestan, it was reported that the private lands in question—in Ahwaz, for example—mostly involved a few very large estates in the north and east of the province. These areas were already being farmed by tractor, so local peasants were not greatly affected by land reform.Footnote 18 Former nomads whose migratory roads had been cut off were among the most affected people; after disputes were settled, some of them settled down and became agricultural workers.Footnote 19
So, what is the significance of land reform for the labor history of 1960s Iran? Taking into account the high urbanization rate of the 1960s and bearing in mind the disputes and the halt to agricultural production that land reform created in its early phase, it primarily served as a “push” to get small farmers and farmworkers, who did not benefit from land distribution, to move to industrial centers and join the urban proletariat.Footnote 20
A New Working Class?
Assef Bayat, who has made a significant contribution to the historiography of the workers’ struggle and the subaltern in Iran, argued in 1989 that land reform and the rapid industrialization wave gave birth to a new working class that lacked the experience of industrial labor.Footnote 21 Bayat claims that this lack of experience, combined with the relatively improved position of the new class of industrial workers (compared to that of landless peasants) and the nonnegligible state pressure against organized collective action resulted in urban workers refraining from labor activism—unlike their predecessors during the period prior to the 1953 military coup. As a prominent scholar of the labor history of Iran, which is a field that has been hardly exploited, Bayat's arguments should be discussed.
In “Historiography, Class, and Iranian Workers,” Bayat presents a thorough review of the labor historiography of Iran and identifies four main currents of historiography: orientalists and modernizationists, social-democrat labor historians, Marxist left-wing activists, and Islamic theoreticians who, he argues, as a whole “exhibit an elitist, structuralist, essentialist, and moralist approach to working-class history and behavior.”Footnote 22 While orientalists and modernizationists are criticized for their “non-class perspective,” (they argue the concept of class is irrelevant to understanding the social structure of Iranian society), the Marxist narratives of Iranian working-class history are criticized for doing the opposite by maintaining an essentialist and economic reductionist approach to the working class. It is in his discussion of the latter that Bayat underlines that while “political repression was crucial to the suppression of workers’ organization and struggle after the 1953 coup […], this factor alone cannot explain why the working class failed to reorganize.”Footnote 23 Moreover, he argues that the narratives of Marxist activists have assumed a “fixed and abstract ‘perfect’ consciousness expressed in a universal form. By such a conceptualization, they tend to divorce workers from their true selves, their empirical reality.” Footnote 24 The first three trends that Bayat describes—orientalist/modernist, Marxist-activist, and that of social democratic labor historians—are parallel currents in the historiography of Iran, the earliest products cited appearing during the early 1960s.Footnote 25 Bayat's account of Islamic theoreticians as a current in labor historiography is not relevant here—because they are more producers of theory and discourse than of empirical research, as Bayat argues, and because they are, by definition, associated with the developments in the labor scene of the postrevolutionary Islamic regime, well after the period under study here. The last approach, the criticism of which is relevant to this article, is social democratic historiography, which Bayat identifies as the product of labor historians. While concurring with his analysis of this last approach, I argue that Bayat's approach to 1960s labor history in “Capital Accumulation, Political Control and Labour Organization in Iran 1965–1975” falls into this very category that he critiques.
Bayat argues that this last approach, which has produced the most thorough studies of Iran's labor history, including the works of Ervand Abrahamian and Habib Ladjevardi cited here, focus mainly on the labor movement and by doing so depict the working class “as those working men who have come together in the labor unions, primarily to pursue the political aim of opposing the government.” He argues that such an approach to the labor movement emphasizes labor unions and ignores internal conflicts over questions of interest and vision. More importantly, he criticizes the assumption of a “zero-sum relation between the power of the state and the organization of political activities in general and labor in particular,” which assumes that “when the state is strong, the opposition to it (including labor organization) is weak or nonexistent; and when the state is weak the opposition to it is strong.”Footnote 26
Despite arguing for the necessity of portraying the working class in its totality and not being preoccupied only with the structured and institutionalized history of it, Bayat in his account of 1960s working-class history points to the very same “lack” of organized, political, and conflictive collective action. He offers a different explanation, attributing it not to suppression from the state, and therefore not covered by the theory of a despotic state and vulnerable, oppressed workers, but to the structural inabilities of the new working class, which, he argues, lacks the “industrial consciousness” necessary for that type of collective action. However, he distances himself from the established narratives of “false consciousness” and argues that the “lack” of strikes and labor activism in the 1960s is not a result of workers’ false consciousness, but of rational behavior on the part of the new members of the industrial working class.Footnote 27 Nevertheless, recognizing the agency of the workers does not change the fact that Bayat's argument is still preoccupied with explaining the lack of a certain type of labor activism—exactly what he himself has criticized the social democratic school for doing. To elaborate more on this issue of “the structural inabilities of the new working class,” it would be useful to focus on the particular case under study in this article, namely the oil industry.
Not only did the aforementioned agricultural structure of Khuzestan not lead to a great transformation through the process of land reform, the oil industry was not a labor-recipient industry in the 1960s. The oil industry of Iran, which dates back to 1908, had more than 60,000 workers in the Abadan refinery and oil fields of the South in 1950, one year before the nationalization of oil.Footnote 28 Despite the postnationalization blockade that was led by the United States and Britain, which prohibited Iran from exporting its oil for two years (1952–1954), there was no systematic layoff of workers, with the exception of temporary contract workers. However, the biggest challenge facing the Oil Industry in the late 1950s and 1960s was the problem of “surplus labor” that was introduced mainly after 1954. Accordingly, the Operating Companies, which regulated oil production with the National Iranian Oil Company after the 1953 military coup,Footnote 29 were trying to reduce the number of workers by pursuing a no-recruitment policy and promoting early retirement.Footnote 30 In 1959, a delegate of the oil workers addressed the prime minister, who was visiting the oil-producing region, with these words: “Since the Oil Agreement, it is pretended that some workers are surplus. It may be that it is really so or it isn't. I do not ask investigation in any of these problems at once, I only request that the Prime Minister may instruct that this matter be illuminated.”Footnote 31 The figures of 1954 refer to 24,278 wage earners in Abadan and 16,113 in the oil fields.Footnote 32 There were also 6,000 contract laborers. While no accurate study of the causes of redundant labor or the volume of it had been done, the estimates and rumors converged at fifty percent of the workers being surplus by late 1950s.Footnote 33 The Foreign Office papers of Britain shed light on the oil company's search for gradual ways of downsizing. They report that five hundred workers would retire in a year and resignations and deaths would amount to less than three hundred a year.Footnote 34 Whether the source of the problem was increasing automation of the oil industry, which was not unique to the Iranian caseFootnote 35 or the “populist policies” of Mossadeq, as was argued in the British documents,Footnote 36 the point is that the no-recruitment policy became a standard practice of the oil industry after the 1953 coup.
In addition to that, there was continuing migration to the oil towns. The population of Abadan, where the worker population was mostly concentrated, had grown from 120,000 to 226,000 from 1943 to 1956 (based on a 1943 company survey and the 1956 national census).Footnote 37 As Val Moghadam demonstrates, by 1956, half of the population of both Ahwaz and Abadan, the two oil centers, was composed of immigrants.Footnote 38 The rise in the unemployed population of the oil towns, taken together with the no-recruitment policy and the Operating Companies claims of “surplus labor,” make it more likely that the costs of engaging in overt, conflictive collective action was higher than its potential benefits.
One result of the surplus labor problem and no-recruitment policy of the Oil Company was the institutionalization of the traditional generational continuity of the oil workers by keeping the apprenticeship schools exclusively for the sons of oil workers.Footnote 39 Accordingly, Fred Halliday confirms that the oil industry might have been the only sector in Iran at this time where the working class was predominantly second generation—the children of the working class formed in Khuzestan in 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 40 Therefore, Bayat's argument regarding the lack of “industrial consciousness,” in the new working class of the 1960s, which he describes as “a consciousness which derived its elements from an industrial setting, an urban life and industrial work” does not help us understand the “lack of labor activism” that is referred to among the workers of the postcoup era in the oil industry. They did not constitute a “new working class” and did not go through a transformative change in their conditions in the 1960s.
However, the industrialization wave in Iran had another type of impact on the labor situation of the oil industry. The British Petroleum reports of 1968 and 1971 point to the loss of senior and mid-level staff, along with resignations of the capable and trained graduates of Abadan Technical Institute due to the upsurge in the Iranian economy and the need for more skilled employees in other sectors.Footnote 41 The 1971 report states that exit interviews with staff members who resigned show that most of them left for more attractive offers from outside the oil industry.Footnote 42
The Profit-Sharing scheme, another article of the White Revolution, which in practice was left to a collective bargaining process between the workers’ representative in the factory, or the representative of the majority syndicate and the employer, increased workers’ salaries, albeit in varying amounts and not necessarily in proportion to the industry's profits. And profit sharing did not apply to workers in the oil, railway, and tobacco industries.Footnote 43
The other aspect of this centralized reform program that marks an important aspect of Iranian history of the 1960s is the formation of the literacy and health corps. Seen as irrelevant to the history of the working class, this aspect of the White Revolution has not been studied within the frame of labor historiography. While the land reform and profit-sharing schemes have been touched upon in the narratives of the Iranian working-class history, these aspects of the reform program were left unstudied. The literacy corps consisted of high school graduate conscripts who were sent to villages to teach in the primary schools instead of being engaged in the conventional practices of the army. The literacy corps was influential in raising the nation's literacy rate in the 1960s. The total rural literacy rate in 1956 was fifteen percent; it reached thirty-seven percent in 1971. The total literacy rate increased from thirty-five percent in 1956 to fifty-nine percent in 1971. The increase was even more striking for rural women, whose literacy more than tripled—from eight percent in 1956 to twenty-six percent in 1971.Footnote 44 The number of educational institutions also grew threefold in the 1960s.Footnote 45 Between 1963 and 1971 a total of 62,730 people served in the literacy corps; the health corps, meanwhile, established five hundred medical units in the countryside during its first three years.Footnote 46
The American consular reports on Khuzestan, which is the heartland of oil production, also point to the success of the literacy corps.Footnote 47 The pages of Yaddashtha-ye Rooz, the weekly journal of the National Iranian Oil Company that was published from the late 1950s onward, devoted many of its pages to the literacy and health campaigns in Abadan and the oil fields in the 1960s and early 1970s.Footnote 48 Women in traditional clothing or wearing the veil are the main subjects of the pictures in the journal. While literacy campaigns targeted both the oil workers, who would gain points upon getting certificates, and their wives, it was the wives who were the main focus of health care inspections. Interviews with women living in oil-producing towns in 1960s and 1970s illuminate the impact of these programs on the lives of working-class people. One interviewee, who lived in Masjed Soleiman in 1960s as the wife of an oil worker, stated that there were frequent visits by health corps workers or company health inspectors to the workers’ houses; they would comment on the household hygiene, take notes and give recommendations on how to wash dishes, how to avoid food contamination, and so forth. She mentioned that the inspectors would at times take some of the well-fed children to the neighboring houses as an example of an ideal child of the Oil Company.Footnote 49
Wives of oil workers attend literacy class organized by the National Iranian Oil Company. Source: Iran Oil Journal, no. 122, October 1968, back cover. National Iranian Oil Company, Library of Congress, Washington.
Starting from the early days of the oil industry in Iran, workers employed by the Oil Company benefited from company-sponsored healthcare, which gave them access to a better quality of care than workers in other parts of the country. Thus, it is hard to argue that the health corps made a big change in the lives of oil workers in Abadan and the oil fields in general. In terms of literacy classes or levels of schooling, the oil workers were in a better position as well. Not only were they being encouraged to attend classes in the evenings, they were given raises in accordance with the educational points they garnered. This was not the case for women, who were mainly the wives of workers and not company employees themselves. Therefore, the literacy campaigns had a far more important impact on the lives of the oil workers’ wives than the workers themselves.
The non-factory life of Iranian workers is a realm that is hardly studied. Accordingly, the consequences of the White Revolution have been covered in the labor history of Iran primarily in terms of the working lives of men. However, the health and literacy campaigns did have an effect on the lives of workers beyond their work life in the factories, which needs to be scrutinized further. The impact of the White Revolution went beyond its blueprints and beyond the material realm of workers’ lives, something important to analyze in order to understand changes in the forms of labor activism in Iran. As Ali M. Ansari argues, “The ‘White Revolution’ succeeded, in ways not foreseen by its sponsors, in transforming the political landscape of Iran, economically, politically, and, through the introduction of ‘revolutionary rhetoric,’ ideologically.”Footnote 50 It was the rhetoric of change that marked the speeches of the Shah and the political elites.Footnote 51 This rhetoric culminated in the Shah's claim that he was a socialist. He argued that his reforms had abolished ‘feudalism’ and freed the workers, peasants, and women.Footnote 52 This widespread revolutionary rhetoric had an important influence on the cultural realm of the workers, which will be demonstrated in this article by examples from the tactics used in the collective actions of the 1960s. I argue that this pro-worker discourse of the Shah, which was an important attribute of the White Revolution, was arming the workers with different tools for organizing and engaging in collective action.
One such example occurred in March 1970. On the first workday after the implementation of a new job classification scheme, workers at Abadan Refinery engaged in a slowdown action, which reduced the plant's production rate by half. Over the two weeks the strike lasted, the number of participants reached up to 4,000.Footnote 53 According to a report from the US Embassy in Tehran,
The strike started apparently spontaneously and the workers remained without identifiable leadership. Nevertheless the strikers soon developed an effective informal organization. At key points at the various oil installations in Abadan, the strikers set up “strike centers” manned by workers, from which they elicited support for the strike. Many strikers and members of their families went from door to door trying to sell pictures of the Shah, presumably to earn money to support their cause. …Not only was there no anti-state political content but the workers carefully tried to sanctify their effort through identification with the Shah. Pictures of the Shah garlanded with flowers were set up at the strike centers and workers read aloud from the Shah's book: White Revolution. Workers returned to work on April 4th and were paid fully for all the strike period.Footnote 54
The target of the protest was the implementation of a labor classification scheme that was part of the collective agreement between the National Iranian Oil Company, the Consortium's Operating Companies, and the union representatives of oil industry employees in 1969, the content of which was not made clear to workers, according to the consular report. As was the case with other labor classification schemes, which delineated the minimum and maximum wages that a worker could get as well as opportunities for promotion and social security, it had favored some while giving only limited promotion and pay increases to others. Some workers were left “unslotted,” which meant classified as surplus, and some classifications limited workers’ opportunities for promotion. As a result of the scheme, fifteen percent of the workers received substantial raises, forty percent received a small increase (one to five rials a day), and about forty-five percent received no increase. The latter category comprised unskilled workers in support services like maintenance and transportation. When it was put into effect on March 21, the workers in that category refused to work. The report from the US Embassy of Tehran mentions that the Shah wanted the strike to come to an end, while the rest of the government, SAVAK, and industry management behaved more cautiously to avoid a direct confrontation. As a result of the strike, the workers won management's promise to make the classification scheme provisional for six months, during which it would consider individual complaints. Despite the fact that all strikes had been declared illegal, the strikers in this case were fully paid for the period they were on strike. The strikers did carry the Shah's pictures, as well as sell them to earn money to support their strike. The consular report acknowledges that the strikers knew what kind of activities would not be tolerated and refrained from them; in other words, they were aware of and abided by recognized limits of permissible actions.Footnote 55
The use of the Shah's pictures and the rhetoric of the White Revolution during the oil workers’ strike was not an isolated phenomenon. The following year, on May 24, 1971, The Intercontinental Press reported that workers at the Jahan textile mills in Karaj, forty kilometers west of Tehran, had carried banners in support of the Shah while demonstrating for a wage increase, placing their demand in the context of the profit-sharing principle of the White Revolution. Workers would use the Shah's pictures in more strategic ways as well. During another strike action, workers who wanted to hold a closed meeting had pasted a huge portrait of the Shah over the door of the meeting place to assure that they would not be interrupted by SAVAK. When the SAVAK agents arrived, they had to wait for permission from their superiors before tearing down the Shah's portrait, breaking down the door and disrupting the meeting.Footnote 56 Habib Ladjevardi, the author of the important book Labour Unions and Autocracy in Iran, mentions the same tactic being employed in Abadan. In that case,
The oil workers at Abadan had prevented their managers from leaving the refinery by pasting pictures of the Shah on the doors of their automobiles as they chanted, “Javid Shah”(“Long live the King”). In order to open their car doors the managers would have to tear His Majesty's photograph.Footnote 57
Documents in the United States National Archives, published by Chosroe Chaqueri, provide information on other strikes that took place in the 1960s. The 1964 taxi drivers’ strike, a protest against the doubling of gasoline prices, culminated in the government's lowering the price of gas.Footnote 58 The 1965 bus drivers’ strike in Tehran challenged wage differentials among the drivers, as well as the allocation of houses by government. This action was suppressed by the police, but it led to some changes that were made afterwards.Footnote 59 The Abadan refinery experienced labor actions during this period as well. In 1965, workers organized a slowdown action in the Oil Consortium's metal drum plant. As a result, the Consortium agreed to pay a “difficult work allowance.”Footnote 60 Another strike in Abadan that was recorded in the US consular reports lasted for one week in 1969. It was in response to the cancellation of the New Year bonus expected by the construction workers at the local petrochemical plant. The workers walked off the job and stayed away for a week, at which point the bonus was reinstated.Footnote 61
White collar workers of Abadan Refinery march in the rally at the anniversary of the crowning ceremony of Reza Pahlavi on October 27, 1967, showing their support to the Shah. Source: Yaddashtha-ye Rooz, no. 730, October 31, 1967, published by the NIOC. From the library of the Ministry of Oil, Tehran, Iran.
Workers carry banners and pictures of the Shah Reza Pahlavi in support of the White Revolution at a rally on its anniversary. Source: Yaddashtha-ye Rooz, no. 614, February 14, 1967, published by the NIOC. From the library of the Ministry of Oil, Tehran, Iran.
Most of these strikes were short and nonviolent and appeared to be spontaneous and focused on one demand. They were mostly successful. The 1965, 1969, and 1970 strikes in Abadan were quickly settled, with the longest one lasting two weeks, and the workers’ demands were met to a large extent. Furthermore, despite the “illegality” of strikes in the post-coup regime, none of the strikes, except that of the bus drivers of Tehran, were recorded as illegal, and the participants were paid in full for the time they spent on strike. The labor affairs report of the Department of State points out that most of the work stoppages were settled quickly and, most of the time, informally through the intervention of the Ministry of Labour and generally on more favorable terms than the labor laws required.Footnote 62
The strikes of the White Revolution years that have been recorded in the archives were mainly based on economic demands and did not take long to settle. Moreover, the workers did not resort to violent tactics and, in some cases, even appropriated the state's discourse and patronizing attitude. Interviews with retired oil workers of that period also point to acts that fall into the category of “quiet encroachment of the ordinary.” For example, workers discussed building their own homes close to existing company housing in order to take advantage of the infrastructure provided for the company-owned dwellings.
Holding labor activism to an ideal standard of transformative, revolutionary action renders these struggles that took place in the 1960s invisible. The lack of any conflictive discourse on the part of the workers and the fact that the strikes were short and seemingly spontaneous does not mean that labor activism was lacking in the 1960s. Rather, they suggest the possibility of an alternative type of labor activism, which can be more conciliatory than oppositional in response to a change of the context.
Analyses of different types of labor activism have been conducted within various streams of the literature. From Lenin's discussions of trade union activity versus social democratic revolutionary activity in What Is to Be Done? to James C. Scott's depiction of everyday acts of resistance in Weapons of the Weak, to the “quiet encroachment” thesis of Assef Bayat, different types of labor activism have mostly been understood as alternatives to, if not rivals of, one another.
Lenin criticized the majority of Russian Social Democrats for doing trade union work and argued that,
Social-Democracy represents the working class, not in its relation to a given group of employers alone, but in its relation to all classes of modern society and to the state as an organized political force. Hence, it follows that not only must Social-Democrats not confine themselves exclusively to the economic struggle, but that they must not allow the organization of economic exposures to become the predominant part of their activities.Footnote 63
James C. Scott argues that in dangerous circumstances, acts of “everyday resistance” can be ambiguous and have double meanings. He states that in such circumstances “open declarations of defiance are replaced by euphemisms and metaphors; clear speech by muttering and grumbling; open confrontation by concealed noncompliance or defiance.”Footnote 64 However, Scott has been criticized for juxtaposing covert and overt forms of resistance and showing bias toward the study of the former.Footnote 65 Bayat argues that the “quiet enchroachment of the ordinary” is a useful framework for understand a recurring current in urban activism in the Middle East, which differs from “everyday resistance,” not necessarily in terms of its repertoires of action but in that its targets are the state, the rich, and the general public.Footnote 66 The “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” involves acts such as working in informal jobs, stealing electricity, and squatting, without the benefit of any clear ideology or leadership. Bayat argues that this type of activism corresponds with the decline in traditional class-based activism.Footnote 67 Written in different time periods regarding different contexts, all three approaches assume a zero-sum relationship between a transformative, organized, revolutionary activism and a survival-based, economic, trade union activism: Where one of them exists, the other does not, or is useless.
However, while the main forms of labor activity in the 1960s were the above-mentioned type of nonconflictive, quickly-settled actions, this was not the only kind of activism that existed. Despite the barriers against Left-affiliated unions, the archives of the International Federation of Trade Unions (ICFTU) and its counterpart, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), disclose that the realm of trade unionism was not immune to struggles even at times of overt persecution.
The labor law of 1959 made trade union activity legal on paper, provided that they were registered with the Ministry of Labour, which required a security check from the intelligence service, SAVAK. However, the necessary procedures of registration were not clearly defined, and it took one more year for trade unions to register. After 1960, fifty unions in Tehran and eighteen in the provinces were registered. The US consulate's annual report of 1961 stated that the unions of bakery workers, glass workers, government employees, and oil workers were the best organized.Footnote 68 However, the oil workers mentioned were employees of the National Iranian Oil Company based in Tehran; there were no registered unions in the heart of oil production in Abadan and the oil fields of the South until 1965. In 1965, five unions of oil industry workers comprising employees of the National Iranian Oil Company and the Consortium's operating companies were founded in Abadan.Footnote 69
Before the establishment of these five trade unions in the oil producing South, an airgram to the US State Department from the US Embassy in Tehran titled “Labor Developments in Iran's Oil Industry” mentioned that
[T]he Government and the Oil Consortium are proceeding cautiously with the establishment and eventual registration of labor syndicates in the oil industry. The key problem is how to assure that the syndicates will have responsible, mature leaders who will support the regime and not hinder the operations of the oil industry. To achieve positive security, two full field checks on every proposed syndicate official are being made, one by the State Intelligence and Security Agency (SAVAK) and one by the Ministry of Justice. To diffuse the power of any individual syndicate, the Government plans to create fifteen separate syndicates in the oil industry including five in the Abadan refinery alone. To assure greater discipline among the syndicates, the Government intends to superimpose a more highly selected Federation structure over the oil syndicates. […] [T]here are accepted reports that many of the syndicate officials are, in fact, Government agents.Footnote 70
Despite the presence of these high-security checks and the presence of government agents in the unions of the 1960s, it would be an oversimplification to ignore the presence of alternative voices in the labor movement. The Abadan unions’ attempt to build international ties at the time of their inception demonstrates the existence of a need for international solidarity on the part of the Iranian labor activists of the time. The notes of a conversation between the head of the Personnel Relations department of the Iranian Oil Refining Company in Abadan and the American Council of Khoramshahr in 1965 say that the newly founded unions in Abadan did not only attempt to get in touch with the Western bloc's ICFTU but also the Eastern bloc's WFTU.Footnote 71 Elsewhere it is mentioned that this approach was made by an Abadan petroleum worker, who was an ex-Tudeh Party member.Footnote 72 Efforts like this point to the perseverance of leftist political activists in the trade union movement despite their having become the target of a high level of state surveillance and persecution.
Charles Tilly uses the inclusive term of “collective action” instead of “labor activism,” “rebellion,” or “protest” to get past the dualistic narration of labor activism that I have outlined. He argues that the border between acceptable and unacceptable challenges to the existing power structure varies depending on location, time period, and, most importantly, the approach of the authorities. He states, “Why let the boundary of our subject matter depend on the attitude of the authorities? Collective action, for our purposes, consists of all occasions on which sets of people commit pooled resources, including their own efforts, to common ends.”Footnote 73 Tilly argues that different forms of collective action, or repertoires of collective action, are experienced and learned by activists, interpreted by others, and responded to by the authorities, which lead to a continuous process of evaluation. His is an enlightening approach to understanding the reasons why workers engage in different types of actions depending on context.
Conclusion
The literature on the contemporary history of Iran until now concludes that the years between the 1953 military coup in Iran and the 1979 revolution were dark years for the working class, marked by a paucity of labor activism due to suppression. In the process of reestablishing an authoritarian monarchy, workers’ ability to freely organize was prohibited, and the working class was subjected to surveillance through intelligence organization checks and state-run trade unions. An alternative to this approach, emphasizing the structure rather than the agency of the working class, constructs a narrative that explains the lack of labor activism in the 1960s. It argues that the rapid industrialization of urban centers and the push factors of migration, such as land reform, gave birth to a new working class, which did not engage in labor activism due to its subjective condition. By stressing the pressure factor of the subjective conditions of the workers, both these narratives aim to explain a lack of labor activism during the long 1960s.
In this article, by drawing on examples from the social and political context of the period, namely the impact of the White Revolution, and the particular case of oil workers, it is argued that workers did a cost-benefit analysis of their potential activism and determined that improving their condition did not necessitate entering into an overt conflictive struggle with the State. In other words, the social and political climate of the long 1960s, shaped by both repression and an extensive reform program built upon a rhetoric of change and agency for the working class, enriched workers’ repertoires of action, resulting in workers’ appropriation of the regime's discourse for their own ends.
The characteristics of the oil industry described in this article suggest that a study of the repertoires of action that were utilized in the 1960s would tell us more about the social and political changes that the workers experienced and became a part of than the continuing search for an ideal type of labor activism that is perceived as “lacking.”
