NCRI Labor Committee calls for condemnation of mullahs’ anti-labor policies and support for Iranian workers
The Labor Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran calls on all international human rights organizations, labor rights institutes, syndicates, labor unions and the International Labor Organization to condemn the oppressive and criminal approach adopted by the mullahs’ regime against deprived Iranian workers who protested being fired from work and their unemployment. The Iranian regime responded to these protests by lashing, imprisoning and issuing fines against these protesters. The NCRI Labor Committee is calling for solidarity and supporting Iranian workers to see their most basic rights materialized.
The Iranian regime’s judiciary officials condemned 17 deprived workers of the Aq Dareh gold mine to 30 to 100 lashes and 5 million rial fines (around $170) for protesting their expulsion from work. The lashings were carried out in public. In flagrant collaboration with the Revolutionary Guards that has taken control of the Aq Dareh gold mine for years now, a farce court in the city of Takkab (West Azerbaijan Province in northwestern Iran) issued these rulings on the bogus charges of “preventing people from seeking employment by causing furor,” “insulting the company guard,” “destroying clothes and illegally detaining the guard” and “deliberately destroying the company billboard.”
The Aq Dareh gold mine is a national asset belonging to the Iranian people which the IRGC, like many other natural resources in Iran, has taken complete control over. Back in January 2015 the IRGC-associated “Puyan Zarkan Company” fired 350 miners under the pretext of their “contracts expiring.” On December 27, 2014, three workers committed suicide in the mine vicinity for losing their jobs, and due to the hard burden of trying to make ends meet and the intolerable poverty they were living in.
The inhumane mullahs’ regime has to this day responded to workers’ rightfully staged protests with arrests, imprisonment and lashings. At a time when dozens of factories are closing each day in cities across the country and hundreds of workers are being added to the growing “army of the unemployed,” the religious fascism ruling Iran has intensified its pressures on the workers in an attempt to quell the expansion of their protests. Labor strikes and demonstrations in Iran are being oppressed harsher than ever before.
The NCRI Labor Committee emphasizes that workers’ rights in Iran will only be materialized through the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime and the establishment of democracy and freedom in Iran. The NCRI Labor Committee calls on all the Iranian people, especially the youths, to protest the increasing cruelty that is devastating the lives of Iran’s already suffering workers and their families.
National Council of Resistance of Iran, Labor Committee
May 28, 2016
