Contracting Workers, Revival of Slavery

The following article appeared in the website, kaleme, associated with Mir Hossein Mousavi and Zahra Rahnavard, the Green Movement leaders who have been spending more than 500 days in house arrest in Iran.

Kaleme – Labor Group: Since the start of the new year, March 20, more than three thousand contracting workers have been expelled from the production facilities. This has been announced by Fathollah Bayat, the head of the Contracting Workers Union. He has also talked about the continuation of this trend of layoffs until the end of the year and has told ILNA, the Iranian Labour News Agency, that: In the current year more than 90 percent in the nation’s working community work on three months contract basis at the production facilities.

According to Kaleme, laying off contracting workers has become a standard and frequent news of the past years, and especially at this time that the current government is at the height of its incompetency, there does not go a week without news of this sort.

Along the same lines, yesterday, the executive secretary of the Takestan Labor House also complained about the blank signature and short term contracts in the production facilities and found one of the reasons for burgeoning unemployment to be the ever increasing blank signature and short term contracts.

Declaring that one or two months based and blank signature contracts have destroyed the job security of the workers, Asadollah Mohammad Khanlou told ILNA: “according to the article 673 of the Islamic punitive law, engaging in blank signature contracts with the workers and abusing them is a crime, this act by the employers is not only a crime but also a betrayal of the workers. Khanlou termed the blank signature contracts a kind of “revival of the era of slavery”.

However, it appears that the authorities are not hearing the workers being crushed. It has been long that the labor activists protests against laying off contracting workers has not led to any where and we are witnessing the ever increasing prevalence of employers taking advantage of the contracting workers. Temporary workers while receiving much lower wages and benefits than full time employees, are the first victims of the economic woes in the factories and are constantly under threat of not having their contracts renewed and laid off.

According to Kaleme, temporary contracts are always one of the most important instruments of the employers for extreme exploitation of the workers. Today, considering the increasing unemployment and intensifying the difficulties in peoples livelihood, especially the low wage and toiling strata in our country, the owners using “temporary contracts” impose arduous conditions on workers. Conditions such as no obligations for any benefits, social security and unemployment benefits, sub minimum wages, and free hand in layoffs. Wide usage of these contracts by the employers directly or through intermediary contracting firms in large industrial centers, not only seriously threatens the job security of the workers but also has resulted in hundreds of thousands of layoffs.

In another report, Mahmoud Kouhkan, the head of the Association of Workers Representative in the state of Yazd, reported of lay offs of more than half the workers at Yazd Afshar Wool Weaving factory. Kouhkan talking with Kargar News declared: Some of the employers signing contracts with the workers impose terms which are against the labor law, but the employment situation and the high rate of unemployment in the country has resulted in more people accepting these conditions and coming to terms with the employers.

Temporary contracts did not have precedence in Iran and unfortunately in the early years of the nineties and as a means to safeguard the security of capital, “temporary contracts” gradually took root at the expense of destroying the workers job securities. Despite constant protests of the labor activists against these kind of contracts, in reality we have witnessed yearly increase in this form of new slavery such that today blank signature contracts have become essentially ordinary and prevalent case.

In the labor law, the employment contract has been defined as the following: “Article 7 – The employment contract is a written or oral contract by which a worker in exchange for receiving compensations for his/her labor efforts performs a task either temporarily or on non-temporary basis for the employer.”

The amendments to this article of law are also the following: “Amendment 1 – The maximum amount of temporary time for jobs that are not permanent by nature shall be determined by the labor and social security ministry and approved by the council of ministers. Amendment 2 – In jobs that are by nature permanent, if the duration of the employment is not noted in the contract, the contract will be considered permanent.”

In the early nineties, with the new interpretation by the labor ministry on this article of law, contracts with no dates were removed from the permanent and collective contracts of the workers and in their place, temporary contracts were made official and became prevalent in the country. Until 1994, if any temporary contract was renewed for four times, it was considered a permanent contract and even one month contracts were considered part of this law. In the same year, the High Association of the Employers of the country asking for clarification from the labor secretary complained about this law and the minister on their inquiry called the labor law inadequate; a law that had made life difficult for the workers and facilitated signing of temporary contracts.

With denying workers independent organizations, the right to strike, collective contracts, and even the enforcement guarantees of the labor law disappeared and then with excluding the work places with less than 5 and 10 workers from the labor law, in practice all the construction, carpet weaving, brick making, casting, welding, mechanics, lathing, crystal, painting, tailoring, baking, shoe making, and other trades were excluded from the protection of the labor law.

This trend has been continuing since and in the tenure of Ahmadinejad, culminated in the blank signature contracts. In this period, the employers not wanting to pay for unemployment benefits, embarked upon six and then three and later one month contracts. The spread of this trend was such that today blank signature contracts and using workers labor without paying unemployment benefit costs has become the norm.

Fathollah Bayat, the head of the country’s Contracting Workers Union told ILNA yesterday that: “many of the companies refrain from sending the names of the temporary workers on their unemployment benefits roll.”

Parvin Mohammadi, labor activist and a member of the Free Union of Iranian Workers, also a while back while complaining about abusing workers, said: currently, 70 percent of female workers are on blank signature contracts. On the history of such contracts, she told ILNA: following the interpretation of the second amendment of the article 7 of the labor law, the temporary contracts in labor relations in Iran increased and these oppressive contracts became so entrenched that permanent hiring is now seldom occurring and now with abusing these same oppressive contracts, the blank signature contracts are entrenching their position in Iranian labor relations.

The administration of Ahmadinejad also along with the employers aggravated this super exploitation of the workers and indirectly made it legal as under contracting out, temporary contracts are also being used in the government apparatus.

Although apparently now there is talk of eliminating contracting and changing temporary contracts for the workers to permanent ones, unfortunately in the middle of this change most of the temporary workers are being laid off and only a small segment of the workers will have their contracts changed to permanent.

For instance, one can refer to the head of Association of Workers Representatives in state of Yazd in this regard who gave the report of laying off half of the workers at “Afshar Wool Weaving Company” along implementation of “accounting companies active in government structures.”

Source: Iran Labor Report