04/24/2011
GVF — Just days ahead of International Worker’s Day (May 1st), the Coordination Council of the Green Path of Hope has expressed its support for Iranian workers and once more voiced previously voiced concerns by Green Movement Mir Hossein Mousavi regarding the workers’ right to organise, mobilise and protest.
In its statement, the Council, which is the Green Movement’s highest decision-making body said that in recent years, “instead of privatising, the government has been carrying out a monopolisation, and has been giving away firms and businesses to quasi-governmental and quasi-military bodies for trifling sums, and thus through the concentration of power and wealth in their own hands, they persist in their monocracy.”
The Council, whose members have been chosen by the leader of the Green Movement Mir Hossein Mousavi and Karroubi prior to their house arrest, has also urged the media and social networks to play support the demands of Iran’s workers and sympathise with the country’s labour force which has been hard hit by the Ahmadinejad administration’s disastrous economic policies, in particular its recent subsidy cuts which have had a devastating effect on the country’s most vulnerable.
“Having in mind the economic hardships and demands of hard-working labourers, and under the status quo where the state does not tolerate any level of criticism towards the current situation, the Coordination Council of the Green Path of Hope urges all media and social networks to reflect the heart rendering tragedies which have made life more difficult for the various groups in people. While stressing the indisputable rights of workers to voice their demands and fully supporting [the right to hold] demonstrations and assemblies, in accordance with annual custom, the Council calls on all the supporters and activists of this pervasive popular movement not to hesitate in supporting the demands of this land’s brave workers as well as sympathising with and aiding them.”
The statement also argues, “without resolving the flaws in the country’s political system, it is not possible to speak of any economic revival.”
Referring to the false promises made by Ahmadinejad during the 2009 presidential race, the council added: “If at that time, there were still those who did not believe the government would deceive, today the state’s lies have become so apparent for all, that not only farmers, workers and labourers, but everywhere in this poverty stricken country filled with misery despite having the largest amount of underground resources and social capital, they no longer believe their empty promises.”
“The country’s hard workers saw how the problem of housing and unemployment not only remained unresolved, but intensified,” the statement said. “The people of this land have witnessed how the oil revenue not only didn’t find its way into their dinner tables, but their dinner tables shrank by the day.”
“Strikes and protests by workers are taking place everyday and across the country, despite the [government’s] violent action,” the council noted. “A charity-like economy, whose harmful and undignified consequences government critics had warned about, is shattering the hopes of workers and employers and has brought the wheels of the country’s economy to a standstill these days.”
The Coordination Council of the Green Path of Hope also criticised the Ahmadinejad government’s irresponsible mismanagement of oil revenues of the past six years, which has been more than 500 million dollars, more than Iran’s oil revenues under all the previous administrations put together. It also said the income had been “used for the unrestricted import of low-quality goods.”
“It is as though the goal of this great Revolution [in 1979] was to become independent of one superpower, but to become reliant on another.”
The council also dismissed the unemployment and growth rates announced by the Ahmadinejad government as “baseless,” arguing that “out honourable workers feel the country’s critical economic situation with their flesh and bone and the baselessness of the government statistics about economic growth are comprehensible for them, more than any other social group.”
“It is natural that in such circumstances, the 850,000 jobs per year that were to be created under the fourth development programme are not created, but rather, we’ve had a rise in unemployment. Can one imagine the hiring of new workers by a production unit that hasn’t received any new investment and its sales and profits have also remained the same?”
“The reality is that the militarisation of the economy and politics in recent years has crippled the Iran’s economy,” the statement went on to add. “Tens of thousands of workers across the country have not received their wages in months. Their basic rights such as the right to carry out union activity, the right to protest against working conditions, the demand for a wage increase that matches the increase in inflation, the ability to earn a living through working for a single shift per day and the right to influence their destiny are being neglected through [the government’s] resort to all types of cunning measures. Iranians see their greatest asset; the hope for a better future, shattered and their greatest God-given gift, their human dignity, stumbled upon.”
“Iran is a great country with massive natural resources as well as experts, workers and creators of job opportunities who can return the country to the position it deserves, should their right to determine their own destiny be returned to them.”