Eyeing Oil Revenues, Iran’s Public Sector Workers Demand Higher Wages
In its first 200 days in office, the Raisi administration has encountered massive labour mobilisations. In late January, medical personnel across the country’s hospitals and universities joined the picket line. In February, teachers reportedly staged demonstrations in over a hundred urban areas. Last month, pensioners and welfare beneficiaries rallied in more than a dozen major cities.
Motivated mostly by wage grievances, protestors have adopted a range of assertive slogans and demands. In one provincial city, teachers hung up a big banner that read: “Raisi, Qalibaf, this is the final message: the teachers’ movement is ready to revolt.” Pensioners called Raisi a “liar,” blamed his government for neglecting “the nation,” demanded an end to “oppression,” and called for the immediate release of political prisoners.
Commentators have lumped these labor protests together with other recent protest actions. A recent Financial Times report suggested that workers’ rallies and protests over water rights indicate growing popular discontent with the country’s economic record, leaders, and political institutions.
But these broad explanations fail to capture the undercurrents of the labour mobilisations of recent months. Iran’s economy has been doing poorly for years and dissatisfaction with the government is nothing new. It would also be wrong to assume that labour protests are motivated by general public dissatisfaction. In fact, most of the large and coordinated protests have been staged by a rather specific type of worker: state employees. These are relatively educated and privileged workers, employed in protected administrative and professional jobs in Iran’s state bureaucracy and civil service.
Protests by state employees need to be understood in the context of negotiations over the country’s annual budget. The annual budget, which sets wage levels across the public sector, is approved by the Iranian new year in late March. Workers often mobilise during annual budget negotiations, a drawn-out process involving multiple state actors and institutions. Sectoral and labour pressure tends to intensify when negotiations reach their final stages.
While budget-related protests are a routine occurrence, they have been especially widespread this year because workers are emboldened by the prospect of higher oil revenues. The international price of oil has spiked over the past months and state authorities have already revised projected oil revenues upward. Iran is also in advanced negotiations on the country’s nuclear programme, which may result in sanction relief, potentially unlocking billions of dollars in government income.
As employees of the Iranian state, public sector workers hope to benefit from these injections of oil money into Iran’s fiscal system. State employees are mobilising now in an attempt to lock in favourable spending commitments for the upcoming fiscal year. In 2014-2015, when Iran was in similarly advanced talks with the Obama administration over sanctions’ relief, public sector workers also mobilised in large numbers.
A final factor is the legitimacy of the Raisi government itself. Coming to power last year through manipulated elections and record low turn-out, Ebrahim Raisi has been eager to display himself as tolerant and understanding of the country’s impoverished urban middle classes. Raisi has tried to court Iran’s historically reformist-leaning middle classes to gain a degree of popular legitimacy and consolidate his tenuous leadership among various hardliner factions.
Teachers, pensioners, and nurses represent a bloc of reformist-leaning state employees that have coordinated protest actions over the past months. Rather than cracking down on their rallies, security forces have relied on containment and targeted repression—strategies which, so far, have not been successful in preventing further protests.
Teachers have staged by far the largest rallies, winning major concessions in the process. They began protesting right when Raisi came to power in August 2021. Nationwide strikes in November 2021 put pressure on parliament to finalise an expensive piece of employment law that teachers’ unions had long lobbied for. Emboldened by this legislative victory, teachers have continued to protest to make sure that the government allocates enough money to the program.
Teachers, pensioners, and nurses have long complained that government spending prioritises state employees in the armed forces, judiciary, police, and the security apparatus. Over the past months, the government has tried to address their concerns about pay discrimination by reigning in salary increases in these relatively privileged and conservative-leaning parts of the state.
Notably, in January, parliament rejected a bill on payroll spending in the judiciary. Judiciary workers and lawyers immediately responded by taking to the streets, angered by the fact that Raisi, their former boss and patron, had hit their interests so openly. The judiciary protestors argued that they too have a range of legitimate concerns, including having to rely on corruption and bribe-taking to top off their salaries.
In response, the head of the Administrative and Recruitment Organisation justified limiting spending on judiciary salaries by stating that it would “create dissatisfactions in other government bodies.” Mehdi Taghiani, a hardliner MP from Esfahan, made a similar claim. “Severe inflation over the past years has reduced the purchasing power of all workers, not just one specific group in the civil service. If we increase salaries in the judiciary, it will lead to a domino effect by which pay discrimination will eventually lead to the collapse of the government’s financial system,” he stated.
The Raisi government has tried to sell its fiscal policies as prudent and responsible to the outside world. Iran’s finance minister recently proclaimed that the country’s new budget “includes a number of structural reforms.” Such structural reforms, he explains, include “increasing the salaries of government employees at rates less than the inflation rate.”
Yet, the final budget, which was approved several days ago, shows little evidence that the government is committed to austerity and lowering labour costs across the board. The budget increases spending on education by 40 percent, almost double last year’s raise. The government also decided to increase the official minimum wage in the upcoming Persian year by over 50 percent, which will take its real value back to 2017 levels.
In a move away from austerity, the budget contains a variety of cuts and concessions that are part of Raisi’s strategy to mediate between various public sector demands while trying to win over sceptics and opponents. These policies will not only fail to address fundamental labour concerns, but internal rivalries and sectoral interests within the public sector will almost certainly continue to undermine labour solidarity. Teachers and judiciary personnel, for instance, have refused to express support for each other’s struggles. After the judiciary protests in early January, the Twitter feed of Mohammad Habibi, an outspoken leader of the largest teacher’s union, remained unusually quiet. Long-standing competition over the allocation of state resources have led to mutual suspicions will prove difficult to overcome.
Photo: IRNA
