Iran:
Worker Combativeness Shows No Sign of Waning

Oct 28, 2024

This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2934 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

Begun this summer, the struggle of the nurses and, with them, the entire health sector in Iran, has spread across the country. From Isfahan to Tehran, demonstrations have spread everywhere and are constantly picking up.

By the end of September, 40 cities and 70 hospitals were affected by the movement. Alongside other healthcare workers, nurses have been calling on the government for several months to improve their working conditions and derisory wages. What’s more, the overtime they are obliged to work goes unpaid. “Inflation is in dollars, our wages in rials [the Iranian currency],” say the nurses. Another of their slogans is: “We don’t want to die on the job anymore,” as several of these women have literally died of exhaustion, victims of “karoshi,” a chronic stress that leads to total exhaustion.

The deaths of three of their colleagues last March, and the murder of Parvaneh Mandani, a nurse at Sepidan Hospital, on August 2, have further fueled the revolt. Several striking nurses have been arrested and are threatened with dismissal by employers, while intimidation by the forces of repression is multiplying.

The struggle of nurses and healthcare workers is not isolated. In fact, workers all over the country and in many different corporations are striking and demonstrating for higher wages, in the face of galloping inflation (over 60% year-on-year), for better working conditions, or simply to obtain payment of their salaries. Truck drivers, copper or coal miners, oil workers ... every month active or retired workers strike or demonstrate.

In this country of 92 million inhabitants, despite threats, despite dismissals, arrests and sometimes heavy prison sentences, the working class has never stopped fighting. These strikes remain in the field of defending workers’ economic interests. But, by their very existence, they take on a political character in the face of the Islamic Republic’s harsh regime, especially two years after the youth revolt triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini and the repression that followed.

The Iranian working class can be an immense force if it becomes aware of its class interests, which go beyond the borders of Iran, and if it finds the way to organize itself into a real political force. One that could not only shake up the regime, but overthrow it.