Over the last fifteen days, reports from different towns and industries in Iran painted a consistent picture: people who work—factory hands, municipal crews, oil and gas employees, platform drivers, miners, and border laborers—are carrying the country’s crises on their backs. The same problems return again and again: unpaid wages, unstable contracts, sudden layoffs, dangerous worksites, shrinking benefits, and pressure from employers and state institutions. This article does not list every incident. Instead, it summarizes the main patterns to help readers understand the economic reality many workers face—and how layoffs, intimidation, and policing have become part of how the state and employers manage the labor force.
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Unpaid Wages and Everyday Survival
The most common headline is simple: workers do not get paid on time. In several factories and public services, wages are delayed for months. Municipal workers in different cities complained about missing paychecks and even missing insurance payments that were deducted from their salaries but never forwarded to the social security fund. Forestry guards in the north reported three months of unpaid wages. Pump station workers in the southwest said they had received no salary or insurance since the beginning of the year.
For a family living on wages, a missed paycheck is not an abstract number—it breaks the budget for rent, food, medicine, and school. When insurance contributions are not transferred, a sick child can suddenly become a financial emergency. This is why repeated delays turn into street protests or sit-ins outside offices. The issue is not only poverty; it is uncertainty. People cannot plan a week ahead.
Precarious Contracts and Easy Layoffs
Another consistent theme is the spread of short-term contracts and outsourcing to layers of contractors. In practice, this means a worker may do a permanent job but hold a temporary contract—renewed every few months. When business slows, electricity fails, or managers want to cut costs, dozens of people can be dismissed overnight with “contract expired” as the reason.
In recent days, contract endings were used to remove long-serving steel workers; a home-appliance factory dismissed around one hundred employees in two waves; and more than fifty fuel-station workers lost their jobs after privatization changed ownership. In the gas mega-projects of the south, whole teams faced group layoffs after years in harsh conditions. Outsourcing creates distance between the real employer and the worker, making responsibility blurry and resistance harder.
The protests and strike of Razi Petrochemical workers have entered their 18th day. The workers are demanding the removal of contracting companies and the signing of official contracts. So far, several workers have been arrested and fired, but the striking workers remain determined to bring back their colleagues to work and achieve their demands.
On Tuesday night, August 13, the security chief at Razi Petrochemical, backed by company management and the Mahshahr prosecutor’s office, kicked veteran workers out of the plant at midnight and blocked the night shift. The message was blunt: break the strike or lose your livelihood. It’s the same old script—fear, lockouts, and slicing through collective solidarity.
Safety at Work: Accidents That Repeat
Workplace safety is not a side story; it is central to how the labor market functions. Within this short period, several fatal or severe accidents were recorded: trench collapses, mine cave-ins, falling steel parts, electrocution on construction sites, and elevator failures in high-rise projects. Official provincial numbers also showed dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries within a few months—while everyone admits real figures are higher because many small workshops, informal sites, and migrant jobs are not counted.
Safety failures happen for familiar reasons: old equipment, no protective gear, low training, rushed schedules, and an inspection system that rarely stops production. For migrant workers, especially Afghans in construction, risks are higher and protection is weaker. An accident often ends not only a life but a family’s only source of income.
Border Livelihoods: Work When There Is No Work
On Iran’s borders, people who cannot find formal jobs turn to high-risk livelihoods—carrying goods on mountain trails or transporting fuel. In these two weeks, multiple incidents were reported: land mines from past conflicts, vehicle rollovers on poor roads, fires, and live fire from armed forces. These are not “side businesses.” In regions with long unemployment and little investment, they are survival. Every funeral is a reminder that without stable jobs, the most dangerous work becomes the only work.
Oil, Gas, and Petrochemicals: Visible but Unequal
Iran’s energy sector is supposed to be the country’s economic engine. It is also a window into the broader labor problem. Across offshore platforms and southern complexes, employees—both permanent staff and contractor workers—held gatherings or strikes over the same issues: wage ceilings on operational posts, unequal pay for equal work, unpaid benefits for harsh zones, and threats to pension funds. In a petrochemical complex, contractor workers demanded equalization with neighboring plants; on another site, employees used a specific form of protest—refusing the company canteen’s food—to signal collective anger at discrimination.
The sector shows how layered contracts split the workforce into “official,” “contract,” “outsourced,” and “temporary,” with different rights and salaries. Management often treats each layer separately to prevent a common voice. Yet the complaints—low real wages against high living costs, eroded benefits, and insecurity—are widely shared.
Municipal and Public Services: Frontline Without a Shield
City workers—street cleaners, parks crews, drivers, and office staff—keep daily life moving. But their problems mirror the private sector: delayed wages, partial payments, and unclear deductions. In one city, pay stubs showed salary cuts without explanation; in another, employees said their insurance was deducted but not transferred, blocking access to treatment. In a third, sanitation workers approaching retirement were told their status had changed and their cases were stuck between the municipality and the social security office. When essential services depend on people who cannot rely on their own pay or pension, both dignity and public trust suffer.
Retirees: The Paycheck After Work That Still Doesn’t Come
Retirees from telecoms, steel, media, and other sectors continued regular gatherings to demand long-promised “equalization” and the payment of old dues. Their message is direct: after decades of work, pensions do not cover basic living costs. Hospital and drug bills rise, while indexation lags. Many retirees now join across provinces and across funds—evidence that the pension crisis is national, not sectoral.
Platform Work and the “Digital” Trap
Drivers working for ride-hailing platforms described a different version of the same reality. Commission rates and municipal fees take a large share from small fares; vehicle maintenance, fuel, and inflation eat the rest. The promise of flexible, modern work often becomes a path to longer hours and lower net income. Because drivers are treated as individual “partners,” they lack the tools of formal employees to negotiate better terms.
Where Police, Security, and Management Meet
Economic pressure is reinforced by intimidation. In several cases, workers who asked for unpaid wages or fair insurance reported being blocked from the workplace or threatened with blacklisting by contractors. Two workers arrested during an industrial dispute were later released but reportedly faced access bans. Teachers faced heavy administrative punishments—dismissals, forced transfers, suspensions—through internal boards. A factory worker who demanded his insurance reportedly suffered physical assault by the employer’s agents. These actions create a climate where asking for a legal right becomes a risk. It is not only an employer’s choice; it is a system where labor disputes quickly touch security institutions, courts, and policing.
Why This Keeps Happening: The Structural Picture
Taken together, these stories point to a structure with several pillars:
- Delayed pay as practice, not exception. Cash-flow problems, mismanagement, and weak enforcement make “late wages” a management tool rather than a failure to be punished.
- Short-term contracts and outsourcing. By moving jobs to contractors and signing brief contracts for permanent needs, employers make layoffs cheap and organizing difficult.
- Weak safety enforcement. Inspections are limited and penalties are too light to change behavior, especially where projects are under time and cost pressure.
- Fragmented labor force. Different categories of workers doing similar tasks receive different pay and rights, which blocks common bargaining and keeps wages down.
- Policing of labor disputes. Instead of strong, independent mechanisms to resolve conflicts, authorities often respond with surveillance, summonses, or administrative punishment.
- Inflation and cost of living. Even when wages arrive, their value falls. Without reliable indexation, every month reduces purchasing power.
What These Fifteen Days Tell Us
If we step back, the map is clear. Workers in Iran are asked to accept late wages, unstable contracts, and dangerous worksites while inflation eats their income. When they resist, they meet a mixture of pressure: denial of entry to workplaces, threats of blacklists, disciplinary boards, and—in some cases—arrests or force. Border workers take extreme risks because regular jobs are scarce. Retirees fill the streets because pensions do not pay for medicine. Platform drivers call it “digital servitude” because a modern app still extracts the old way.
This is not only an economic crisis; it is a management method. Layoffs, intimidation, and policing are not random accidents. They are tools that, together with outsourcing and legal gaps, keep labor cheap and quiet—at least for a time. But the last fifteen days also show another pattern: people continue to gather, write, and speak. Oil platforms, petrochemical yards, city halls, mines, and factory gates became places where workers tried to turn private loss into public demand.
For readers outside Iran, the headline is straightforward. The economy’s problems land first on workers: unpaid wages, easy layoffs, unsafe jobs, and shrinking pensions. The state does not only fail to protect; it often joins with employers to control and silence. Understanding this does not require every detail of every protest. It requires seeing the system: a labor market organized for flexibility at the top and insecurity at the bottom, where law and police power can appear when a wage claim becomes a “security” matter. The last fifteen days were simply a concentrated snapshot of that system—and of the people who keep the lights on despite it.
