Workers, toilers, and freedom-loving people!
Today is May Day, International Workers’ Day; a day on which the working class across the world brings its history of struggle, suffering, and hope into the streets and to places of work and life, and keeps the banner of solidarity and liberation raised high. Kolbar News sincerely congratulates this historic day to the workers and toilers of Kurdistan, Iran, and the world, and to all fighters for equality and freedom.
Today, the working class of Iran is living through one of its most difficult periods. Severe price increases, crushing inflation, and wages many times below the poverty line have destroyed workers’ lives. Temporary and blank-signature contracts, lack of job security, absence of insurance, and the lack of any real rights in the workplace have made the situation unbearable. Millions of workers remain poor even with full-time work. They are unable to provide basic necessities such as food, housing, healthcare, and education for their families. Alongside this, widespread unemployment among young workers and the children of the working class, even those with higher education, has pushed them to the margins. This situation is the direct result of the rule of the rent-seeking and religious capitalism of the Islamic Republic and its ties with major domestic capitalists and global capital.
The 12-day and 40-day wars and the military adventurism of the Islamic Republic in the region have imposed additional pressure on the working class. On the one hand, workshops, factories, and workplaces, under the shadow of bombardments, have directly become killing grounds for workers, and on the other hand, through the absence of safety and labor standards, the increase in deadly accidents, and the transformation of workplaces into prisons where workers must either submit to deadly conditions or, through dismissal and layoffs, be thrown into the margins of poverty, workers’ lives are indirectly threatened with physical and psychological destruction. Yet even with all this, these are not the full dimensions of the catastrophe. The enormous costs of militarization, warmongering, and internal repression are paid from the pockets of workers and toilers; through reductions in welfare budgets and public services, through the continual collapse of the value of wages, and through the imposition of unemployment and wages many times below the poverty line. This policy has effectively condemned millions of workers to gradual death; a death in which exhaustion, malnutrition, illness, despair, and addiction are different faces of a single catastrophe.
Despite all these pressures, the working class of Kurdistan and Iran has not remained silent in the face of capitalist oppression and exploitation. Despite the official prohibition of strikes and any independent gathering, in recent decades we have witnessed, on average, thousands of strikes, gatherings, and labor protests annually across different sectors: from oil and petrochemicals to steel and automobile manufacturing, from mines and railways to education and healthcare, from municipal workers to contract and temporary workers. These protests, which are often met with repression, arrests, threats, and dismissals, demonstrate that the working class is neither passive nor surrendered; rather, it is searching for more effective ways to organize and impose its demands. With the decline of the wartime atmosphere and the anxiety caused by military tensions, this class, relying on its rich background of struggle, can and must begin a new round of struggle for its demands with greater strength and awareness.
Nevertheless, one of the main weaknesses of labor struggles in recent decades has been their fragmentation. Although every strike and every protest is, in its own place, an important and courageous step, separate strikes limited to one factory or one city, without coordination and simultaneity, can hardly force the regime and capitalists into serious and lasting concessions. The global experience of the working class, as well as the experience of workers in Iran and Kurdistan themselves, has shown that the real power of this class lies in “unity of action” and the simultaneity of nationwide strikes and protests; in connecting economic and trade-union struggles with political struggle against the entire ruling capitalist system. Overcoming fragmentation and moving toward nationwide coordination is a vital and urgent task in the coming period.
Kolbar News believes that the working class of Kurdistan and Iran, in the period ahead, is compelled to place two central and vital demands at the heart of its struggles; demands without the realization of which advancing toward higher levels of political organization and exercising leadership over other progressive social movements will be extremely difficult:
First, the official and unconditional freedom of the right to strike, in the broadest sense of the word; that is, the recognition of workers’ right to stop work at any level and at any time, without fear for their livelihood, dismissal, arrest, or repression.
Second, the freedom to form and operate independent workers’ organizations, in its full and comprehensive meaning; namely, the right of workers to create unions, associations, councils, federations, and any type of organization elected by and accountable to themselves, independent of the state, employers, security institutions, and state-controlled labor houses and yellow councils.
Imposing these two demands on the ruling class is not a secondary demand, but rather the precondition for opening the way toward socialist organization and the exercise of the leading role of the working class throughout society. As long as these freedoms have not been officially, legally, and practically achieved and consolidated, the struggle of the working class must focus on practically imposing them at every level. This means that workers, in the course of their daily struggles for work, wages, insurance, housing, workplace safety, and other livelihood and trade-union demands, assert in practice their right to strike, assemble, elect genuine representatives, and establish independent organizations, and do not retreat from these rights. Every strike, every gathering, and every effort to create an independent organization is a link in the chain of struggle for securing these vital freedoms. Only through this living and practical experience can the culture of solidarity, self-organization, and self-leadership of the working class take shape and become institutionalized.
Kolbarnews emphasizes this fundamental truth that the working class is the only class that, through its own liberation, will free all of society from exploitation, oppression, and discrimination. The society for which the working class struggles is one based on equality, public welfare, and the elimination of all forms of national, gender, religious, and class oppression; a society without the exploitation of human beings by human beings, without poverty and humiliation. This perspective is grounded in the objective position of the working class within social production and its decisive role in sustaining the material life of society. As long as social production turns on the shoulders of workers, this class can and must use its power to break capitalist relations and establish a new, socialist, and humane order.
Kolbarnews, on this global and historic day, calls on all workers and toilers, all socialists and freedom-loving people, to move forward around common demands toward unity, organization, and a more conscious and nationwide struggle. May Day is the day of the power and hope of the working class; let us turn this day into the starting point of a new stage in the struggle for liberation.
Board of Directors of Kolbarnews
May 1, 2026
May Day 2026