On Sunday, June 28, groups of Iranian workers and pensioners took to the streets across several cities, holding protest rallies to demand their basic rights, unpaid wages, and improved living conditions. The protesters demonstrated incredible resolve, continuing their weekly gatherings despite extreme weather and harsh economic realities. In Shush, a group of Social Security pensioners held a march and protest rally while temperatures in Khuzestan province exceeded a scorching 50 degrees Celsius. Highlighting their loss of faith in the regime’s hollow promises, they chanted, “We can only get our rights on the street,” emphasizing that relentless street protests remain their only avenue for justice.
The demonstrations on June 28 were not isolated incidents. Rather, they are part of a sustained wave of weekly trade protests taking place across various Iranian cities in recent months. Sunday’s rallies spanned multiple major urban centers, including Mashhad, Kermanshah, Rasht, Ahvaz, and Shush. In Ahvaz, groups of protesting workers and pensioners gathered in front of the Social Security Organization building located at Kargar Square in the Farhang-Shahr district to demand answers for their deteriorating livelihoods. Meanwhile, in Isfahan, retirees of the steel industry held a significant rally outside the governorate building, loudly voicing their grievances regarding dire welfare and living conditions.
At the core of the protesters’ demands is the regime’s systemic failure and deliberate mismanagement of public wealth. Participants called for the full implementation of existing laws, the payment of long-overdue wage demands, and urgent attention to critical healthcare and medical shortages. According to the protesting pensioners, the regime’s blatant disregard for exact legal execution and the deliberate, incorrect misinterpretation of certain articles of the law have left a significant portion of their legal and trade demands completely in limbo.
A major grievance driving the unrest is the government’s failure to pay the pension increase differentials for the first two months of the Persian calendar year. Social Security pensioners have been discriminately left empty-handed as the economy continues to worsen in the conditions caused by the regional conflict and the regime’s corruption and prioritization of its apparatus of warmongering and terrorism.
The ongoing street protests further highlighted the total paralysis and lack of accountability within the regime’s institutions. Demonstrators pointed out that the parliament’s shutdown over the past few months has severely diminished any remaining oversight over the government and the Social Security Organization’s performance regarding retiree laws. Furthermore, the protesting retirees forcefully emphasized the urgent need for the government to pay off its massive, accumulating debts to the Social Security Organization. They made it clear that the regime’s repeated excuse of a “lack of financial resources” is entirely unacceptable and must not be used as a convenient cover to justify ignoring the laws and denying pensioners their hard-earned dues.