Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Iran: Poverty and New Draconian Labor Laws




Thousands fall through the cracks and get little help as traditional support systems fray.

Los Angeles Times: TEHRAN —


Atefeh is one of the younger members of Iran's merchant class. Her sales territory is the notorious traffic jams of north Tehran. She moves in on potential clients when the light turns red, pressing her face to car windows, cocking her head to one side and putting on a plaintive face.At 12, she isn't as good at plaintive as some of her younger competitors, two boys who are hawking Koranic inscriptions and balloons just up the street. Sometimes her face looks more furious than sad. But she still can clear 55 cents a day selling her packages of pink-and-red strawberry chewing gum to bored and surly drivers.A decade ago, street children were rare in Iran, with its long traditions of charity for the poor, government aid programs and strong family connections. No more.Nongovernmental organizations estimate that the number of street children in Iran, officially listed at 60,000, has grown in recent years to 200,000 or more. Many of them are the offspring of Afghan refugees. Others come from Iranian families who have slipped, through unemployment, drug addiction or illness, into the populous ranks of the urban poor.Social activists say high unemployment, ballooning inflation and misdirected government subsidies have left many families unable to support themselves without turning to their children to help with earnings. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected two years ago on a pledge to deliver Iran's oil wealth back to the nation's dining tables, has done little so far to improve the lot of Tehran's poorest families."In the early days of the revolution, I remember the slogan was, 'Welfare, food and health for everyone,' " said Bahram Rahimi, director of training at the Children's House of Shoosh, a school in south Tehran that provides part-time instruction to street children too busy working or too poor to attend normal schools.


The Children's House stands in the middle of a commercial block in one of the most crowded districts of Tehran. Inside, its corridors are lined with cheerful, hand-painted murals and its classroom chairs are arranged in haphazard clusters, testimony to a young clientele unaccustomed to sitting still in neat rows.About 55% of the city's street children are offspring of the estimated 1.5 million refugees who have flooded into Iran from Afghanistan in waves over the last 20 years, school officials say, and many of the rest are children of single parents, mixed-nationality families or Gypsies.

Many come from the growing number of families beset by drug addiction as heroin shipments across the Afghan border have multiplied since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.Rahmatollah Sedigh Sarvestani, a sociology professor at the University of Tehran, said the number of drug addicts in Iran, officially listed at 1 million, is more likely closer to 3 million, with the number of users possibly as high as 6 million."We don't have enough job opportunities for people. We are facing, even after the revolution, class differentiation, inequality in income, wealth and power. So there are good reasons to have so many addicts, and every other social deviancy," Sarvestani said. "This is everywhere. Not just here and there. Everywhere."Atefeh, who was afraid to give her last name, is a dark, slight girl who looks much younger than 12. She moved with her family to Tehran from the Caspian Sea region several years ago...

Beside mismangement of Iran's economy and oil infrastructure, one reason for the systematic poverty is that Iran's government has discouraged the formation of an industrial middle class because they don't want to repeat the late Shah's mistake where the middle class had the economic power to turn against him. That would leave 80 percent of the economy essentially in the hands of the state. As a result, there is no solid cadre of business leaders to pressure the government.

Despite its massive oil reserves, the country has very little capacity to produce substances like gasoline and jet fuel. It is estimated Iran's imports in this area are at about $10 billion a year, a figure that may represent up to a third of all imports. As A jacksonian eloquently puts it:

It is a metastable system with a heavy change bias to it. Internal collapse between 2012-19 is certain with current domestic market needs increasing and actual oil field production declining. And like many systems in decay the half-life is very important, because it is usually the inflection point for catastrophe: it is the point where a ship sliding to its side will suddenly capsize. It is the spell of bad weather for a year or two that can change lush cropland into dustbowls.

A point of no return!

Note: Iran - the second-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, and the fourth largest in the world - possesses 12 percent of the world’s crude, with an estimated 130 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

And on the New Labor Laws and Privatization to be unveiled soon:

Why Ahmadinejad Wants a New Draconian Labor Law for Iran

By Amir Taheri, Arab News

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears determined to confront Iran’s increasingly restive labor movement.
The showdown, begun last year, could reach a peak next week with government plans to crush International Labor Day demonstrations on May 1 by illegal trade unions.
The Islamic republic has always associated May 1 with leftist ideologies and has tried to promote an alternative “Islamic Labor Day” on May 2.

This year, however, a number of illegal trade unions have announced they would hold May 1 demonstrations in Tehran and 20 provincial capitals. The newly created Workers’ Organizations and Activists Coordination Council (WOACC), a grouping of over 80 illegal trade unions claiming a total membership of over a million in 22 cities, is leading the move.
The WOACC emerged in the wake of strikes by Tehran transport workers that brought the capital to a standstill last year. The authorities succeeded to end the strike with a mixture of mass arrests and wage concessions. However, the example set in Tehran spread to other cities and industries.

The rising labor movement started with local grievances linked to wages and working conditions. In the past few months, however, it has developed a broader consciousness by highlighting issues that concern most workers.

One issue that has brought the hitherto scattered illegal unions together is their opposition to President Ahmadinejad’s proposed new Islamic Labor Code. The text proposed by Ahmadinejad cancels virtually all the rights that working people have won throughout the world over centuries of social struggle and political reform. It abolishes the legal minimum wage in favor of rates fixed through agreement by employers and employees.

It also allows for the generalization of verbal employment contracts, gives employers the right to hire and fire as they please, and makes legal holidays, sick leave, and pension schemes conditional to agreements on a case-by-case basis.

At the same time, it imposes a ban on independent trade unions. Instead, it proposes the creation of Islamic Guidance Councils to promote “Islamic values and sensibilities” among workers.

In a detailed critique of the proposed text, the WOACC shows that the new code violates the Islamic republic’s constitution, Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and accords Iran has signed with the ILO over decades.
“The proposed text is a charter for slavery disguised as an Islamic code,” a WOACC spokesman in Tehran said over the telephone last week.

That view is shared by some members of the Islamic Consultative Majlis who criticize Ahmadinejad for refusing to submit his text to normal parliamentary procedures. Instead, the Ministry of Labor is trying to railroad the draft law through a Majlis committee controlled by pro-Ahmadinejad parliamentarians.

Ahmadinejad’s confrontational style in dealing with the labor movement has also been criticized by some top mullahs within the regime.

Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi, the Islamic chief justice, has warned that the government’s repressive approach could destabilize the regime. Former President Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a mullah-cum-businessman who heads the powerful Expediency Council, has called for “sensitivity” in dealing with what may be the most serious challenge the regime has faced in years.

Why is Ahmadinejad so determined to defy a grass-root workers’ movement by imposing an unpopular law? Part of the answer may lie in the massive privatization scheme that Ahmadinejad is expected to unveil this year.

According to government sources, 44 state-owned conglomerates will be put on sale at a total price of $18 billion. These businesses employ an estimated 3.5 million people across the country. A majority of likely buyers will be mullahs and their associates, operating through supposedly religious and charitable foundations, along with officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Although potential gold mines, most of the businesses concerned have been losing money for years, because of inefficient management and corruption. They also suffer from the fact that they have had to employ far too many people, often because of nepotism and favor distribution by powerful figures of the regime.

Under the existing Labor Code, it would be difficult for the new owners to downsize the labor force or close loss-making units. The new Labor Code would give future owners carte blanche to reorganize the businesses. According to unofficial estimates, a million people could lose their jobs under privatization.

“Ahmadinejad is laying the banquet table for a big feast of plunder,” says the WOACC spokesman.

The situation is further complicated by UN-imposed sanctions that are starting to bite. Dozens of small businesses have already closed down or reduced their activities for want of credit facilities, imported parts and raw material, and fears of being shut out of foreign markets. The thousands of workers who have lost their jobs as a result plan to be in the vanguard of the May 1 demonstrations.

Update 1: BBC on Workers Protest in Iran

2 comments:

joy said...

It's sad that a nation with such a wealth of natural resources can't take care of its people. We're living in a frustrating world.

SERENDIP said...

thejunkyswife: The money goes to fund all the terrorists' organization and their families and their housing and their arms and missiles around the ME, Hizballah, Hamas, Afghnistan, Iraq milita, and building useless nuclear weapon.

Hizballah supporters in Lebanon have better medical care and better hospitals in Lebanon courtesy of Islamic Republic of Iran than Iranians living in abject poverty with no health care.

Thanks for visiting my blog.