NCRI – Textile workers have staged a protest outside Iran’s parliament to demand their legal right to retire after 20 years.
The demonstration by employees at the Isfahan textile factory is the latest in a series of workers protests over unpaid wages, blank employment contracts and inhumane working conditions.
The latest gathering outside the parliament in Tehran took place as Ashadollah Abbasi was being approved as the new head of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of on Sunday.
A workers’ spokesperson said: “The law states we should retire after 20 years but unfortunately the law is not being put into practice. We don’t want anything more than the law to be applied.”
The factory management claims that workers can only retire after 20 years, if ten of those years are spent doing hard manual labor in fields.
Meanwhile, 25 workers from the Jute Factory in Rasht have demanded 22 months of unpaid salary be paid, a Jute Factory representative told the ILNA news agency.
A recent statement by the Human Rights Watch Organization on workers’ living conditions said almost 80 per cent of Iranian workers engaged unofficially on a daily pay basis or employed with temporary contracts, meaning they have a reduced salary and are deprived of job protection.
