On Friday, June 7, the 112th annual meeting of the International Labour Organization (ILO) commenced at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva. Delegations from 178 countries are participating in this annual meeting.
Although the ILO, by adopting a tripartite approach, defends the dominant socio-economic relations in the capitalist world, the magnificent global workers’ movement, especially militant unions, has managed through long struggles to include conventions, recommendations, and agreements in the agenda of this institution that defend some of the fundamental rights of workers worldwide.
As in previous years, representatives from the regime and organizations affiliated with the Islamic government are participating in this year’s meeting. The organizers of this meeting are well aware that despite the Islamic Republic’s membership in the ILO and its official commitment to implementing its resolutions, the conventions and recommendations of the ILO are continuously ignored and violated by the Islamic Republic.
A look at the current situation of the Iranian working class, including teachers and low-income earners, in just a few examples from hundreds of cases of human rights violations of these wealth, blessing, and culture creators of society, clearly shows this reality:
– Preventing the formation of workers’ unions and violently suppressing independent labor organizations.
– Repressing the teachers’ union movement, imprisoning its activists, promoting blank contracts, and employing through contracting companies, resulting in a significant gap between the wages of official and unofficial workers, instability in the job status of contractual and unofficial workers, and depriving a large section of workers from social insurance and unemployment benefits.
– Stagnant retirees’ wages despite inflation and the devaluation of the Iranian currency, the collapse of the social security organization with the increase of informal employment, which has significantly depleted social security resources.
– Excluding the majority of workers from the coverage of the Islamic Republic’s “Labor Law,” a law itself based on brutal exploitation standards and Islamic jurisprudence.
– Ignoring the demands of hardworking teachers, keeping them in absolute poverty, which directly affects students.
– Setting the official minimum wage several times below the poverty line.
– The devaluation of workers’ lives due to non-compliance with safety and work protection standards, leading to a rise in fatal work accidents.
– Commodifying healthcare, housing, education, and health services, along with the government shirking all its governing responsibilities towards workers, reducing or eliminating welfare, legal, and living support, resulting in a decline in the living standards of the working class.
– Severe discrimination in hiring female workers and depriving women of any social coverage.
– Intensifying the exploitation of internal migrants, who mostly come from oppressed nationalities in Iran.
– The complete lack of rights for Afghan refugees who are exploited as cheap labor without any social security coverage or official employment benefits.
– The exploitation of child labor and neglect of the living conditions of the child labor army.
The Islamic regime, by violently suppressing independent labor organizations, teachers’ unions, and retirees’ associations and denying them the right to organize, eliminates the possibility of their legitimate and organized protests. Currently, several labor activists are imprisoned due to these struggles and protests, or are out on heavy bail. Therefore, the representatives sent by the labor organizations affiliated with the Islamic government are not qualified to represent the interests of the Iranian working class. They are spokespersons for the Islamic government of Iran.
We demand the full implementation of the ILO conventions, especially concerning the right to freedom of association, strike, and collective bargaining. We demand an end to the torture and violation of the human rights of imprisoned workers and trade union activists and all political and ideological prisoners, and their immediate release.
The executions, which have recorded an unprecedented high this year, mostly victimizing the marginalized due to the regime’s socio-economic policies and the oppressed and deprived nationalities in Iran such as the Kurds and Baloch people, must end.
The killing and harassment of porters (kolbars) in Kurdistan and fuel carriers in Balochistan, who risk their lives due to unemployment to provide a meager living, must end. Representatives of the Islamic Republic should be expelled from the ILO.
