The following is Shahrokh Zamani Action Campaign’s short piece that was included in an internationalist leaflet distributed in London on May Day.
Shahrokh Zamani Action Campaign – May Day 2017
Since May Day 2016 the class struggle in Iran has intensified. There have been hundreds of protests and strikes across many industries, including a teachers’ protest across Iran. From relatively new industries like gas to older ones like coal and gold mining, sugar plantations and refining, aluminium and other metal smelting, workers have taken action to demand unpaid wages, to fight for better pay and conditions, to stop layoffs and so on. Workers have even protested outside the regime’s phoney ‘parliament’ against plans to water down the gutless Labour Law. Pensioners from various trades have also been protesting.
The regime takes this workers’ resurgence very seriously: flogging seventeen gold miners at Agh Darreh, jailing even more labour activists and preparing itself for class war as part of para-military war games. It is also not letting up on cutting social insurance, expanding the Free and Special Economic Zones (and excluding their workers from the Labour Law’s limited safeguards) and planning to privatise – i.e., asset-strip – a further 201 state-owned companies. And the regime’s callous behaviour, whether in relation to firefighters who died in the collapse of the Plasco building or the public outcry following the leaking of executive pay at Iran’s main state-owned insurance company, further unmasks its class character.
That is why, despite all the anti-worker measures taken, the workers have stepped up their struggles and won important victories like the strikes at Iran Transfo and HEPCO road construction equipment.
Show your solidarity with Iranian workers’ struggles by helping the activities of the Shahrokh Zamani Action Campaign.
Long live independent workers’ organisations!
The right to strike is an absolute right!
Free all political prisoners!
Open the books, end all ‘business secrets’!
Iranian workers are not alone!
Shahrokh Zamani Action Campaign
1 May 2017
Shahrokh Zamani Action Campaign 