From incorporation to fragmentation

Academic literature on Iran has prioritized the relationship between the Islamic Republic and 'popular' and informal sectors over industrial labour, yet without investigating the way in which such sectors contribute and participate in labour politics. The multidimensional position of labour, its complex relationship to political change, and its role in re-producing the legitimacy of the state, have been neglected. This thesis relies on archival research, participant observation and interviews to argue that state-labour relations remain key to understanding processes of political change, development, and democratization in contemporary Iran. Employing critical juncture analysis, I contend that the absence of labour from the 2009 Green Movement was not only a product of the oft-quoted 'populism' of Mahmud Ahmadinejad, but can be traced back to longer dialectics of labour incorporation paired with political integration and dis-integration. In the early post-revolutionary years, the state paid little attention to labour, partially because the elite could not agree on how to interact with workers and feared their independent power. This changed after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, when the centrist Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani incorporated labour through welfare expansion, and employed corporatist-minded political organizations, notably the Workers’ House, to mobilize labour support for his government. With these labour organizations continuing to fulfil such mobilizing functions in alliance with the reformists after 1997, they gradually became semi-autonomous empires influencing enterprise unions, welfare institutions and other labour-related organizations. The incorporation projects pursued by Rafsanjani and the reformists generated internal contradictions and political obstacles, including the Workers' House's 'imperialistic' tendencies, entrenched opposition, and class struggle within the ruling coalitions. As a result, labour increasingly moved in opposition to the reformist project, helping to bring to power the conservative Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad's subsequent attempts at extending welfare and building parallel corporatist organizations weakened and divided labour, fundamentally altering structures of political contestation.