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During the recent years, our
country’s workers and toilers have faced immeasurable difficulties and
obstacles.
Widespread use of the temporary
and blank-signature contracts, extensive dismissals at the factories and small
and large production plants, wages lower than the inflation rate, vanishing of
job security and detention and prosecution of labor activists, and fearful
atmosphere at the industrial and service centers are some of the difficulties making
living conditions for workers and their families grave and unpleasant.
There is hardly a day not to
witness distraught workers’ protests against anti-people social-economical
programs dictated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
In our country, for more than two
decades, based on neo-liberal models, different governments of the Islamic
Republic have implemented orders and prescriptions of these two international
capitalist organizations. The result of implementation of these policies is in
front of us: Unjust distribution of income, wider class divisions and
increasing of poverty in an alarming and unprecedented scale.
Workers more than other classes and
social stratums have suffered damages and harm from implementation of these
policies; therefore, with such programs that have targeted their interests, they
have been, and are, in conflict and battle.
During all these years, workers’
protest struggles against economic programs and the ruling autocracy have not been
organized.
The reason that up to now, in
their struggle against these policies and the people implementing them, workers
have not achieved major victories, has turned into a key question among the
Iranian workers’ existing labor-union movement.
Why the recent years’ struggles
have not been able to force the reactionaries to make acceptable changes, in
the interest of workers, in their economic-social policies?!
Where should we search for the
cause of this problem?!
With a review of the recent
years’ experiences, one can realize that the major and fundamental weakness of
the workers’ protest movement is its separation and lack of organization.
In reality, due to the lack of independent
unions, formed with genuine class orientation, reflecting and representing
trade interests of all workers regardless of their viewpoint, ideology,
religion and belief, in their struggles our country’s workers and toilers have
not been able to achieve significant accomplishments.
Labor-union rights of Iranian
workers are violently denied and suppressed. Without a doubt, devoid of
independent trade organizations (union), workers will not be able to defend and
guard their trade-benefit rights and interests and prevent encroachment and robbing
of their rights and historical achievements by big capitalists.
A review of the process of reform
of the Labor-Law and the Social-Security Law and their contents, proves that on
the basis of the fifth-development-plan, which is based on the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank’s prescriptions, the ruling reactionaries have
prepared widespread provisions to raid the historical achievements of the
workers.
With the intension of restoring
labor-union rights and establishing and reinstating independent unions, as
workers we also have to fight with all our means and capabilities.
Only with a united struggle we
can stop the big capitalists’ repeated assaults on the interests of the
workers. Therefore, in current conditions, demand for freedom of labor-unions
and prevention of government and its associates’ interference in labor-union
activities, is a critical and urgent necessity.
The responsibility of genuine
labor-unionists, independent unions and all labor activists is a joint and
united struggle for restoring labor-union rights, and organizing wide spectrum
of workers in labor-unions. Only with such an approach we can bolster the country’s
existing labor-union movement and consolidate workers’ conditions in different
arenas of life.
