Exiled Queen Raises Hope Iran Will Be Free In New Year

The decision is expected to be made this week, with contract workers most vulnerable.

A 15-hour session of the Supreme Labor Council, the body responsible for determining the minimum wage, ended without reaching a final agreement Saturday, leaving millions of workers in doubt of their future.

The government has already decided to give its employees both in the administrative bureaucracy and its business enterprises a mere 20-percent raise when annual inflation tops 50 percent.

The government’s administrative bureaucracy, including education but not the armed forces employs around 2.5 million people.

Workers say due to the high cost of living and economic problems, they cannot agree with the government’s current proposals, which barely allow them to survive.

The minimum needed for an average family is around $310 to $390 a month. Even if the government manages to double the current minimum salary of around $100, it will fall way short of the amount needed.

Labor representatives insist that next year’s minimum wage in the non-governmental sector should be on par with the inflation of over 50 percent, but government representatives are of the idea that salaries should increase at about the same rate of public-sector employees.

There are no reliable figures about the unemployment rate in Iran because the government is known to manipulate economic data for political reasons. The labor ministry, for example considers one hour of work per week as employment, but experts believe well over 20 percent are unemployed and many more have unstable employment.

Ali Shamkhani traveled to Baghdad on Sunday as head of a delegation including the governor of the central bank and the assistant foreign minister for the Persian Gulf countries.

The trip is part of Iran’s renewed zeal to revive ties with regional neighbors and deepen relations with its global allies.

Shamkhani has visited China and the UAE in the last eight days, much needed in the face of a collapsing economy and growing political isolation on the world stage.

According to IRNA, the Iranian state news agency, the Secretary of SNSC will hold negotiations with Masrour Barzani, the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region, and Qassim al-Araji, the Iraqi National Security Advisor on the issue of border security.

Shamkhani signed a pact with the Saudis earlier this month to resume bilateral political ties with the mediation of China.

Shamkhani also visited Abu Dhabi and Dubai last week, meeting senior officials of the United Arab Emirates.

Iraq has played an important role in the recent negotiations between Tehran and Riyadh.

Face-to-face negotiations between delegations from Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the mediation of Iraq, began in Baghdad in 2021, and Oman also played a role in the talks.

“Nudism has been spreading due to the enemy’s trickery more and more but while we are showing patience, there is only passivity and lack of decisive action in the atmosphere of the country,” 46 officials of religious seminaries, including officials of women’s seminaries, wrote in a letter to President Ebrahim Raisi Thursday.

“We will not be able to demand the implementation of other laws in the future if we back down on the Hijab Law now,” seminarians said in their letter while criticizing the withdrawal of the infamous morality police patrols from the streets and demanding “immediate” action.

Morality police patrols were withdrawn from the streets in October amid nationwide protests that followed the death in custody of the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini who was arrested for failing to wear her hijab ‘properly’.

Protests sparked by Mahsa’s death have grown much less fierce and frequent since January while hardliners’ demands for enforcement of the Hijab Law have considerably grown.

Many of the women who burned their headscarves during the protests, particularly the younger generation, are still defiantly appearing ‘hijabless’ in public in unprecedented numbers. 

Women’s defiance, which also signals their defiance of the clerical rule, is too vexing to the hardline establishment many of whom are trying to cast the responsibility of enforcement of hijab rules on businesses and encouraging individuals to take the matter into their own hands.

Ayatollah Mohammad-Mahdi Hosseini-Hamedani, the Friday imam of Karaj, criticized businesses for not addressing the hijab issue and said retailers, banks and government offices must enforce the rules.

Last week, the judiciary in Kashan ordered a very popular boutique hotel, Sara-ye Ameriha, in Kashan and Matin Abad Eco Camp about 45km from the same city to shut down on the grounds that their guests had not abided by “Islamic norms and the hijab rules”. 

Sara-ye Ameriha, a massive historical house restored and turned into a boutique hotel shut down for failing to force guests abide by hijab rules.

The hotel and eco camp were both reopened Thursday after the tourism minister, Ezzatollah Zarghami, denied his ministry’s involvement and said shutting down such places was unacceptable because it violated the rights of domestic and foreign tourists that had made reservations and promised to resolve the problem.

Local authorities often take the matter of enforcement of hijab into their own hands by threatening businesses and even shutting them down if they fail to force their clients to abide by the rules.

On Thursday, the public and revolutionary prosecutor of Khuzestan Province not only warned to shut down local businesses but also warned that vehicles, presumably taxis and private cars, could also be impounded for passengers’ infringement as this “promoted hijablessness” .

Lawmakers have also drafted a new law that if approved would increase CCTV and social media surveillance of hijab and punish not only “offenders” but also businesses which fail to enforce the rules on their premises.

Bijan Nobaveh, one of the lawmakers behind the plan, said earlier this week that punishments included cutting mobile phone and internet access of “offenders” but Ahmad Naderi, a member of the presidium, later accused the media of using Nobaveh’s personal views to launch “an onslaught against the parliament”.

The plan demonstrates that lawmakers are not learning from experience. “Do not step on people and the society’s nerves,” the reformist Ham Mihan newspaper wrote Thursday, while mentioning other serious problems such as the high rate of inflation plaguing the economy.

A 15-hour-long session of the Supreme Labor Council ended on Saturday without reaching a final figure for the next year’s minimum monthly wage. The minimum needed for an average family to simply survive is about $310 to $390 a month, but even if the government manages to double the current minimum salary of around $100, it will fall way short of the amount needed. 

The Supreme Labor Council, which consists of representatives of workers, employers, and the government, is the Islamic Republic’s mechanism to determine the salaries of the workers, in the government controlled economy.

The government has already decided to give its employees both in the administrative bureaucracy and its business enterprises a mere 20-percent raise.

Labor representatives insist that next year’s minimum wage in the non-governmental sector should be on par with the inflation of over 50 percent, but government representatives are of the idea that salaries should increase at about the same rate that public-sector employees are set to receive.

Labor groups walked out of the Friday meeting as a sign of protest, but they returned to bargaining at the request of the labor minister.

According to the centrist website Entekhab, pundits believe that the Council will settle on a final figure of about 70,000,000 to 80,000,000 rials (between about $155 to $180 at today’s exchange rates). The government and employers are pushing for these figures, but labor rights activists say that according to the inflation rate and official statistics of the poverty index, next year's wage figure should not be set below 100,000,000 rials (about $220).

According to the International Labor Organization, the purpose of minimum wages is to protect workers against unduly low pay.

According to Iran’s Minister of Cooperatives, Labour and Social Welfare Sowlat Mortazavi, the final session will be held on Sunday, the last working day of the Iranian year. In addition to Mortazavi, Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance Ehsan Khandozi and Minister of Industry, Mines and Trade Reza Fatemi Amin represented the administration of President Ebrahim Raisi in the session.

When the government submitted the budget bill to the parliament in January, it sought to significantly increase the minimum monthly salary for the next Iranian year (starting March 21) but considering the steep devaluation of the rial in February, this seems out of reach.

The impact of rial’s fall will be highly reflected in the real value of the government’s proposed minimum wage increase of 20 percent for the next year. Since early December, the rial has fallen by around 30 percent. Many commodities already cost at least 30 percent more than the wage increase for government employees which will come into effect on March 21.

Iran has one of the lowest minimum wages in the world, but wages were increasing from 20 years ago to about 10 years ago when the minimum wage hit a record high of about $275 a month in 2010. This coincided with the time when the United Nations Security Council began imposing sanctions to force Tehran to roll back its nuclear program.

In January 2023, minimum wages in the EU member states ranged from $410 per month in Bulgaria to $2,500 per month in Luxembourg.

Iranian workers were earning more than $300 a month before the United States imposed sanctions in 2018, which pushed Iran’s currency almost ninefold lower, creating inflation that wages have not kept up with.

Rising prices and economic hardship have led to repeated labor strikes and nationwide protests since 2017, even before the imposition of US sanctions. Iran’s centrally controlled economy is inefficient and not conducive to foreign investments, with high reliance on oil exports.

The only reprieve can come from a suspension of US oil export and international banking sanctions if Iran would agree to a deal with the United States and its chief European allies. However 18 months of talks hit a dead-end in September and sanctions remained in place.

Fars Province judiciary head Kazem Mousavi said the two men had been found guilty of charges including "spreading corruption on earth" and acting against national security, the official news agency IRNA reported, adding that the sentences can be appealed.

CCTV footage broadcast on state TV showed the attacker entering the popular Shah Cheragh shrine in the southern city of Shiraz after hiding an assault rifle in a bag and shooting as worshippers tried to flee and hide in corridors.

The gunman, identified as a citizen of Tajikistan, later died in a hospital from injuries sustained during the attack.

The two men sentenced to death said during the trial that they had been in contact with the Islamic State in neighboring Afghanistan and helped organize the attack, Iranian media reported.

Three other men received jail sentences ranging from five to 25 years in the trial, Mousavi said, adding that several other "Daesh (Islamic State) suspects linked to this case" were awaiting trial.

ISIS took responsibility for the attack on the Shahcheragh in Shiraz on October 26, but some questioned the Islamic Republic’s account saying it was staged by the regime itself to distract attention from nationwide protests.

With reporting by Reuters