[This article is part of the Jadaliyya Iran Page's dossier, "Iran in Crisis: Seven Essays on the Obstacles to Freedom." Click here to read the dossier's introduction and browse the rest of the dossier.]
On January 7th, oil and gas workers in the South Pars gas field joined nationwide protests and launched strike actions across several strategic energy sites. Weeks earlier, thousands of oil workers had marched in Asaluyeh in what many described as one of the largest oil-sector mobilizations in decades. Officials largely ignored the protest, and national coverage minimized its scale. After the January uprisings, reports circulated of mass arrests among contract oil workers, including detentions linked to the IRGC-affiliated contracting network Khatam al-Anbia, where workers reportedly faced restriction on access to lawyers and standard visitation.
The Organizing Council of Contract Oil Workers responded with a statement that refused any separation between economic exploitation and political violence. They condemned “the forces whose command is to kill our children and seize the fruit of our labor,” and described a government “fundamentally based on profit and plunder by a small ruling class, and on exploitation and the imposition of the worst living conditions on the rest of society.” In a few lines, the statement linked wage suppression to political repression and framed them as outcomes of a single structure of extraction and coercion.
Iran has seen recurrent street uprisings alongside a surge in labor action since at least 2017. In oil and petrochemicals, steel, transport, education, and health, strikes and protests have become routine features of everyday survival. They recur around unpaid wages, temporary contracts, inflation-driven wage collapse, and the right to independently organize. These actions are often ignored until they escalate, and escalation is frequently met with arrests and detentions rather than binding settlement. Concessions, when offered, are partial, temporary, or selectively applied. Despite the co-occurrence of labor action and street uprisings, workplace conflict is still often treated as separate from the wider arc of resistance.
Most accounts of Iran’s protest cycles foreground economic crisis, repression, or the cultural and political dimensions of revolt, while labor relations appear as background context at best. When workers are discussed, they are often treated as an add-on that can amplify street mobilization, often through loose analogies to the 1979 revolution. This approach misses the mechanism that ties workplace conflict to street uprisings. The question, therefore, is not whether workers “join” an uprising in solidarity, but why struggles over wages, contracts, and everyday survival so often fail to generate enforceable outcomes, and why these unresolved conflicts repeatedly reappear as broader political confrontation. I argue that Iran’s cycles of uprising reflect a regime of non-negotiability, in which enforceable concessions are systematically blocked, especially under sanctions-conditioned constraints and securitized control of strategic sectors. When a settlement is structurally foreclosed, workplace conflict does not end. It accumulates, generalizes, and converges with broader popular street revolt.
A Decade of Persistent Protests and Strikes
Since 2017, Iran has seen recurrent nationwide protest cycles that erupt, expand rapidly across provinces, face intense repression, and subside without durable institutional resolution. The protests of December 2017 to January 2018 were initially framed around economic grievances, including rising prices, unpaid wages, and pension arrears, before spreading geographically and politically. In November 2019, fuel price hikes triggered another wave that quickly expanded beyond subsidy reform to broader denunciations of governance and inequality. The 2022 uprising again demonstrated how rapidly localized grievances, initiated in Kurdistan and Sistan and Baluchistan, could scale into national confrontation. Each cycle has differed in its immediate trigger, yet the rhythm remains consistent through material shock, rapid diffusion, severe repression, unresolved demands, and eventual re-emergence.
Alongside street mobilizations, labor actions in the form of strikes and workplace protests have been among the most continuous forms of collective action over the last decade, across both industrial and service sectors. Oil, gas, and petrochemical workers repeatedly organized stoppages and slowdowns over wage arrears, contract precarity, and unsafe working conditions, including the 2021 Campaign 1400 that spread across hundreds of contractors and dozens of provinces. Steelworkers at the Iran National Steel Industrial Group have protested persistently since 2018. Truck drivers struck in 2018 and again in 2025. Teachers organized nationwide strikes in 2018 and 2021. Pensioners have maintained recurrent protests since 2020. These struggles formed a durable undercurrent of workplace unrest that predates and outlives each major uprising.
In many settings, workplace conflict is partially contained through bargaining institutions that can produce enforceable settlements, even when gains remain limited. Iran lacks robust bargaining institutions under authoritarian rule, and that absence is not unique. The distinctive pattern that requires explanation is the recurring failure of wage and job-security struggle to produce binding, implemented settlements that endure beyond the immediate protest and extend beyond a single worksite or contractor.
Strikes and protests tend to dissipate under economic pressure and repression, and they frequently escape the boundaries of the workplace to merge with broader political protest. Organizing often carries punishment, and even tolerated channels rarely produce enforceable outcomes. Grievances therefore return under harsher conditions, and street protests become a site where unresolved workplace grievances converge and confront the state. The question, then, goes beyond why protests erupt under economic strain. It concerns why economic struggles over social reproduction so often fail to produce enforceable outcomes, and why they repeatedly converge into nationwide confrontation.
The Architecture of Non-negotiability
Iran is a member of the ILO, yet it has not ratified key conventions on freedom of association and collective bargaining. Domestic law channels worker representation into a narrow set of state-recognised forms. The 1990 Labour Code recognizes Islamic Labour Councils, Guild Associations, and Workers’ Representatives, while restricting independent worker organization. Even within these legal channels, the state and employers retain extensive gatekeeping powers through eligibility rules, supervision of elections, and the ability to withhold recognition.
Despite these constraints, Iranian workers have repeatedly mobilized through multiple forms, including syndicates, informal assemblies, councils, subcontractor networks, and state-sanctioned bodies. The issue is not organizational absence. The issue is enforceability: the capacity to secure outcomes that meet demands beyond partial or selective payment, and to generate structural changes that can establish precedents capable of generalizing across a sector.
For collective bargaining to stabilize conflict, workers need realistic expectations that organization can secure binding outcomes, that organizers will be protected from retaliation, and that gains can be maintained over time. In Iran, these three conditions are weak or absent, precisely when demands become consequential. Wage disputes may yield temporary payments of arrears, yet demands for inflation-adjusted wages, contract stabilization, independent representation, or sector-wide standards, rarely result in durable settlement. Instead, escalation is often met with repression, as seen in the crackdown on organizing at Haft-Tappeh sugar cane factory, where worker representatives faced arrest and torture, and in cases such as INSIG, where workers were arrested in night raids following strike action against corrupt management.
Even when workers organize through one of the legally recognized channels, they face repression with rare enforceable gains. HEPCO (Heavy Equipment Production Company) offers a clear example. After years of industrial decline shaped by sanctions pressures and shifts in trade and industrial policy, the company entered a prolonged crisis that repeatedly disrupted production and produced chronic wages delays. As workers escalated their struggle over the production halt and unpaid wages, the Islamic Labor Council election process was suppressed, and protesting workers faced arrest and police violence. Other cases reveal a similar trend: when workers follow the legal route, representation can still be nullified. At Chadormalou mine, workers’ representatives affiliated with the Guild Association were fired from the workplace in retaliation, despite pursuing representation through formal procedures. These experiences teach a consistent lesson that legality does not guarantee protection, and representation does not guarantee settlement.
At this point, the distinction between legality and illegality becomes less important than the practical question of enforceability. Legally recognized bodies lose practical relevance when they cannot secure binding concessions. What remains is a structure that absorbs grievances through delay, fragmentation, and selective concessions, while blocking the formation of binding precedents. The outcome is a cycle in which conflict is managed without being settled, and the same demands return under worsening conditions.
In many sectors, outward movement also reflects a shift in where decisions are made. In workplaces where production has stalled or collapsed, demands quickly move beyond wage arrears to the resumption of production itself. That demand addresses the employer, but its conditions sit above the employer in procurement policy, import access, credit constraints, and state allocation decisions shaped by sanctions. The firm becomes an intermediary rather than the final authority. In the service sector, a similar displacement appears through macroeconomic policy. Nurses, teachers, municipal workers, and pensioners confront wages eroded by inflation and budget ceilings. Their livelihoods are shaped less by a single manager than by fiscal decisions, monetary instability, and state regulation. Under these conditions, basic economic demands are addressed to the state because the workplace lacks the authority to resolve them. When workplace struggles cannot produce secure, enforceable outcomes, conflict moves outward, returns under harsher conditions, and increasingly converges with broader popular confrontation. In strategic revenue sectors such as oil and petrochemicals, the structure hardens further because disruption to critical revenue flows is treated as a security threat rather than a negotiable dispute.
This foreclosure of negotiation reflects more than institutional malfunction. It reflects an incompatibility between enforceable labor claims and an accumulation strategy built on intensified surplus extraction under constraint. Binding concessions raise fiscal costs and create standards that can travel across contractors and sectors. Under these conditions, blocking settlement becomes a rational strategy for a regime that governs through volatility, subcontracting, and coercive containment.
Sanctions and the Reorganization of Accumulation
The erosion of settlement cannot be separated from the reorganization of capital accumulation over the past decade. Under sanctions and financial exclusion, the state’s room to concede narrowed and the cost of binding agreements rose. Since at least 2012, Iran’s political economy has operated under tightening sanctions, restricted access to global finance, volatile oil revenues, and constrained trade channels. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, these pressures reshaped how profit is made and who absorbs economic risks. Inflation eroded real wages, wage arrears became normalized, and insecurity spread across both formal and informal labor markets.
These shifts unfolded unevenly across sectors. Export channels contracted and hydrocarbons became even more central to foreign revenue. At the same time, manufacturing stagnated, and parts of the industrial base, including auto, heavy machinery, and textile, hollowed out or slipped into chronic crisis. Many displaced industrial workers moved into lower-wage service jobs and the increasingly unstable gig economy. In strategic extractive sectors, subcontracting chains expanded and workplace discipline hardened, particularly among contract workers. In this setting, concessions acquire a heightened political meaning. A binding wage agreement in a strategic sector is not treated as a discrete workplace adjustment, but as a precedent that can travel across contractors and industries. Under fiscal strain, that diffusion risk becomes intolerable, and enforceable settlement is blocked even when demands are basic and widely shared.
This hardening of non-negotiability was prepared through longer labor market restructuring from the 1990sonward. These reforms expanded subcontracting chains, normalized temporary and contract work, and narrowed the space for independent representation. These arrangements fragmented bargaining and limited the capacity of shop-floor struggle to produce binding institutional change. The intensification of sanctions after 2012 reinforced this logic. Payment instability, procurement bottlenecks, and revenue volatility increased reliance on flexible labor and strengthened the state’s impulse to contain wage demands. Risk shifted downward through contract churn, delayed payments, and wage erosion, while disruption was contained without conceding enforceable rights. Labor fragmentation and legal restriction, therefore, formed the institutional base, and sanctions intensified fiscal and monetary volatility. Together they widened the gap between recurring claims and enforceable outcomes.
Outside the industrial core, the same logic operates through dispersion and replaceability. In service and gig work, inflation-driven wage collapse intersects with a saturated job market and high turnover. Many workers are hired through informal arrangements, short-term contracts, or app-mediated systems that isolate workers from one another and undermine sustainable collective leverage. The threat of replacement becomes a governing tool. Even when workers organize, the same ceilings reappear through limited legal recognition, weak protection against retaliation, and rapid discipline of emerging leadership. In these sites, non-negotiability often appears through dismissal, blacklisting, and the quiet refusal of collective claims.
Containment, therefore, differs across sectors. Securitized coercion is more visible in strategic revenue sites, while market replaceability and informalization do more work in services and platforms. Both pathways block enforceable resolution. When the authority to resolve demands sits outside the workplace, conflict shifts arenas and appears in public space as a direct claim on the state.
Securitized Accumulation and Cyclical Uprising
The tightening of accumulation under sanctions intersects most sharply with labor conflict in the sectors that still sustain the fiscal core afloat. In oil, gas, and petrochemicals, disruption threatens foreign-currency earnings and budget survival, so strikes trigger a different response. They are treated as threats to stability rather than negotiable disputes.
This shifts how conflict is governed. When workers escalate, responses often move quickly from negotiation to coercion through arrests, detentions, intimidation at worksites, and surveillance of organizers. Security-linked contracting networks and state-affiliated firms sit close to the employment relation, especially in subcontracted labor regimes. This blurs the lines for bargaining as workers confront a chain of authority where employer, contractor, and security apparatus are difficult to separate. This produces a concrete bargaining failure. Workers cannot reliably identify an actor that has the authority to concede and the capacity to guarantee implementation. Payroll may run through one entity, contracts through another, and coercive discipline through a third. When authority is fragmented in this way, concessions that are verbally offered are structurally easy to reverse or selectively apply. Moreover, it increases the risk that a strike will be recoded as a security problem rather than an economic demand.
Under these conditions, conflict is governed through a mix of short-term relief combined with coercive pressure. Arrears may be paid to one segment of workers, or released in installments. Management may promise future adjustments, announce a committee, or point workers toward a grievance channel that cannot compel outcomes. These moves reduce the immediate temperature of a dispute while preventing claims from becoming collective standards. Selective, delayed, or contractor-mediated payment pulls workers into separate timelines and risks, and reduces the capacity of strikes to set terms that generalize beyond a single worksite or group. This is the core non-negotiability mechanism in practice: relief happens, yet standards do not.
This dynamic helps explain why workplace conflict in Iran so often spills beyond the workplace. When strikes cannot produce enforceable outcomes, grievances return, harden, and generalize. Street protest becomes one arena where dispersed conflicts are aggregated and expressed as a collective indictment. Economic demands merge with denunciations of state repression and illegitimacy because enforceable economic claims require confronting the political structure that blocks them. The state’s response then reproduces the same cycle. Repression contains each episode, limited concessions fragment it, and unresolved conditions remain. The next shock, whether price hikes, subsidy reforms, renewed inflation, or political violence, reactivates grievances that never found durable settlement. Recurrent uprising becomes a political form of unresolved conflict under structural foreclosure of negotiation.
Conflict without Settlement
Iran’s street protest cycles over the past decade have developed through continual intersection with labor struggles. Sanctions tightened fiscal space, and the state adopted accumulation through intensified surplus extraction, subcontracting, wage suppression, and risk displacement. Labor institutions, including independent and state-controlled forms, remained formally present, but they lacked enforceable power. In strategic sectors, economic governance fuses with coercive authority. The result was a regime in which grievances are registered but rarely settled, where temporary relief substitutes for structural change, and where escalation invites repression. Workplace conflict therefore accumulates and moves outward. In many sectors, it moves outward because the workplace lacks the authority to resolve disputes. When production schedules, wage scales, and survival are determined by procurement, budgets, inflation, and sanction-conditioned constraints, the street becomes the arena where demands can be directed at the institutions that actually have power to make decisions. As such, Iran’s current crisis reflects the cumulative effects of a labor regime that governs without credible negotiation. As long as grievances are contained without enforceable resolution, protests will recur. As long as survival is organized through extraction backed by coercion, economic demands will continue to take political form.