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Iran: 1400 Golestan Fishermen Not Been Paid for Five Months

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NCRI Staff

NCRI – According to a board member of Golestan Province’s Fishermen Trade Union, 1400 fishermen in the province have not been paid for the past five months.

“There are 1400 fishermen in Golestan Province’s ‘Pareh Turkman’ and ‘Pareh Kumishtapeh’ port towns, working for 21 cooperative companies. The sturgeon-harvesting workers, however, have not been paid in the last five months by the Specialized Agricultural Services parent company”, says Aman Kalagi-Toumaj in his interview with state-run ILNA news agency on February 18, 2018.

According to the report, the parent company as the employer blames shortage of funding and financial resources as the main reason for non-payment of workers’ wages.

As the board member of Golestan Province’s Fishermen Trade Union points out, the company’s Sturgeon Department officials have been saying for months that the company lacks adequate funding to pay the 1400 workers’ overdue payments.

This is while according to Aman Kalagi-Toumaj “the sturgeon-harvesting fishermen are working under extremely difficult conditions with the minimum wage that hardly reaches 110 dollars a month.”

The sturgeon harvesting season begins on October 12 each year and lasts until April 9 next year.

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Also on February 17, 2018, Gholamreza Talebi, Executive Secretary of Golestan Worker House, had said that Yurt Coalmine’s workers have not been paid for the past three months.

In May 2017, a few days before regime’s presidential election, a blast and subsequent collapse in Yurt Coalmine left dozens of miners dead.

“There are workers in Golestan Province who are paid only 110-130 dollars a month. And they can’t afford protesting about it as they would be immediately sacked”, says Talebi.

This is not the first time that Iranian workers have not been paid for months. Longtime unpaid working has now turned into one of the workers’ major problems in Iran, according to some worker activists.