“Creating jobs” is the latest ruse to remove the minimum wage

“Creating jobs” is the latest ruse to remove the minimum wage

Employment or further looting of workers' rights?

Analysis by PMOI/MEK

Iran, Dec.29, 2018 - On December 25, Iran regime president Hassan Rouhani presented the next year’s budget bill to the parliament. In his speech, Rouhani touted the bill for its “attention to creating jobs.” Mohammad Bagher Nobakht and Eshaq Jahangiri, both Rouhani’s vice presidents, had already started this a few days ago.

But the claim of “creating jobs” is so flimsy that even media from Rouhani’s own faction find it ridiculous.

Addressing Rouhani, Jahan-e Sanat newspaper wrote: “With this budget, you can’t keep the available jobs, let alone creating new ones.”

But the truth is far beyond Rouhani’s ability—or lack thereof—to create jobs. It’s about evil schemes by all the ruling factions among the Iranian theocracy to provide for laws that allow them to better exploit Iranian workers.

On December 24, Eshaq Jahangiri, Rouhani’s first vice president, unveiled a plan to grant facilities for creating jobs in rural areas.

Iranian state-run television said: “In the Higher Employment Council meeting this afternoon, Jahangiri asked the relevant institutions and banks to speed up facilitation granting processes for rural and tribal plans to create more jobs. Considering 3.2 million unemployed individuals in the country, the first vice president said that 800 thousand new job seekers are added to this number every year.”

Just one day after Jahangiri’s claims, it turned out that the crocodile tears for over 3 million unemployed Iranians are nothing but a cover to give credit and financial facilitations to “employers,” who, in the current pathologically corrupt ruling elite, are affiliated with the regime one way or another.

In essence, it’s yet another derivative of what Iranians call “prilic.” A play of a word that combines the words “private” and “public” to expose the true nature of an ongoing privatization process that hands over publicly owned companies to “private” citizens, who just happen to have very strong connections—familial or otherwise—to government institutions (e.g. IRGC etc.).

On December 25, Jahan-e Sanat newspaper published an article titled, “Government’s show of creating jobs, hopeful of the parliament’s confirmation,” and wrote: “These gentlemen don’t say how they intend to create jobs! Even now the government doesn’t quit its show to pretend that it’s trying to create jobs.”

The newspaper article then continues to describe the behind-the-scenes of Jahangiri’s statements and reveals an exploitative plan called “abolition of the minimum wage for workers in rural areas” which is circulating the Iranian parliament right now.

And it becomes clear that the government is giving financial facilities to Iranian Aghazadehs—an Iranian term that literally means “children of the masters” and describes rampant nepotism and corruption in colloquial language—under the guise of “creating jobs in rural areas,” while the parliament is removing the “minimum wage for workers in rural areas” to pave the way for blatant exploitation of Iranian workers.

On December 1, state-run Mehr news agency quoted a member of the Higher Council of Labor saying: “The Institution that is behind this bill is from Isfahan and a member of the parliament is currently seeking to pass it.”

On December 18, ILNA news agency described the situation as follows: “Mafia gangs have targeted ‘minimum wages.’ The only verb that is conjugated correctly in Iran is ‘to accumulate.’”

Over the past year, the living standards of Iranian workers have plummeted sharply. According to official sources, the 19.5-percent increase to their wages at the beginning of the Iranian year couldn’t even equate their wages to what they received two years ago. Current statistics show that Iranian workers’ purchasing power is 50 to 80 percent less than two years ago.

Over the past 12 months alone, the Iranian currency has lost more than 50 percent of its value while minimum wages have stayed the same.

Iranian workers’ cries in Haft Tappeh or the continuous protests of the steelworkers in Ahvaz are just the tip of the iceberg that the Iranian regime couldn’t manage to suffocate and censor.

And one can’t expect more from a regime that is based on 1,400-year-old laws and customs. The only solution is a fundamental transformation in the system that is nothing less than regime change.