Iranian Revolutionary Socialists’ League

Editor@kargar.org - www.kargar.org - BM KARGAR, London WC1N 3XX, UK.

Communiqué 14

1 November 2000

The Iranian regime’s anti-working class policies

Alarmed by the increase in the number of unemployed workers looking for work on the streets of Tehran, the City Council recently came up with a “solution”! Councillor Morteza Lotfi said in an interview published on 26 October: “For the citizens’ benefit and to help with public order and clean up the city’s environment and to organize these forces, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs has a duty to advise these workers according to their vocational skills and to round up and identify the illegal foreign workers. And to reassure the people by preventing the gathering of these ‘floating labour’ elements in the streets and finding accommodation for these workers in specified area.”

Such a futile act does not help the unemployed workers dispersed throughout Tehran. This measure is only intended to help those who are on the streets to hire cheap labour. Through this measure foreign workers will be “rounded up and identified” and ultimately expelled and the rest of the workers put under control and their wages kept low (according to their skills, of course!). In this way the workers will be like slaves. They will be put in specified areas simply for selling their labour power.

Would it not have been better if this “member of the Executive Committee of the Tehran City Council” had paid attention to the root of the problem instead? Workers who come to the big cities to sell their labour power are forced to do this out of desperation. Instead of job creation and raising production the Islamic regime has plundered the people through different “foundations” (such as Mostazafin, Alavi, Ghods-e Razavi, 15 Khordad). As a result a small number of people have become wealthy and the rest are living below the poverty line. According to official figures, to stop the rise in unemployment 750,000 jobs need to be created every year (whereas in the past six months only 40,000 unemployed people were able to find jobs).

High unemployment, soaring prices and the official plundering of the people by state “foundations” have led to this suffering. “Rounding up and identifying” a few hundred foreign workers in Tehran will not solve this problem. If the regime’s elite and the capitalists are incapable of solving the problem, then it would be better if they hand over the running of the economy to the workers. Only an independent workers’ union can solve all the problems faced by workers and organise all affairs in Tehran (and other cities) and open the books of the “foundations” and go through their accounts.

Executive Committee of Iranian Revolutionary Socialists’ League