[Post-]War Diary Notes 6
“I have been living in Iran for about 15 years. My jobs have included installing and repairing air conditioners, agricultural work, and producing and installing flooring. But I never had a contract; they simply never signed contracts for foreign nationals. We also had no insurance. Whenever an insurance inspector came to the company, we had to hide so they wouldn’t find us and the employer wouldn’t have to fire us. My daily work hours were between 12 and 13 hours. When I worked in the greenhouse, we had to start at three in the morning. We had no safety equipment whatsoever. We had to bring work clothes, gloves, and even food from home. The salary we received was about 9 to 10 million tomans, but they never paid on time. Sometimes we had to wait until the 15th of the next month, and even then, only after a lot of insistence and complaints, and in the end, they would pay only half. Several times, companies did not pay our wages at all. When we followed up, they threatened to call the police if we came to the company. Because we don’t have documents, the fear of the police is always with us. Now I am unemployed. Covering living expenses, rent, and food has become very difficult.”
“I started working when I was 13 years old. I have done many kinds of jobs, such as agriculture, working in manufacturing, a recycling factory, and tailoring. For some jobs, I was just a simple laborer, but I gradually learned tailoring. I worked at least 12 hours every day, sometimes even more with overtime. They used to pay me about five million tomans per month. When the electricity went out, we had to go home and then return to work after the power was restored. Many days I worked until eleven at night. I was always short on money and had to work even on holidays. They still haven’t paid me the salary for the last month I worked, even after three months. Now I’m unemployed and alone at home. I can’t go outside or to work because I’m afraid of being deported.”
These are the words of precarious Afghan workers who today live semi-hidden on the outskirts of Tehran. Workers who are only “seen” in the moment of work, and that too under the hardest and cheapest conditions; but everywhere else, they remain invisible. Invisibles even lower down within the already marginalized working class, excluded from all formal and even class structures. These workers are deprived even of the minimum conditional rights that other “Iranian” workers can claim, the same rights that, through various tricks such as the elimination of independent labor organizations and the creation of state-controlled workers’ bodies like the “House of Worker,” in reality, are hardly enforced at all. But Iranian workers at least sometimes remain on paper covered by labor laws.
Even if an Afghan worker has spent their entire life in Iran, they are deprived of the right to live:
“Although I have been living here for 15 years, I still do not have legal documentation. Four years ago, they gave us census papers and said they would be extended after seven months, and we spent a lot of money on this. But after the seventh month, the process of deportations began again along with renewed harassment of foreign nationals. If you have a passport, you can renew it, but if you only have the census paper, absolutely not. For visa renewal, you always have to go to the Foreign Nationals’ Guardianship Office 5 to 10 days before it expires. But if you go just two days before expiration, you face a lot of humiliation and insults, and most likely your paperwork will not be processed. Due to fear and mistrust of people, when buying household items, we have to go with a small child or send women to shop. We can never go to restaurants or cafés or walk in the street or park. It feels like we are always under surveillance. We can never have a bank card. We are always afraid of whoever obtains the bank card for us. We fear that if we have any money, they will burn the card and we will lose even the money for our bread tomorrow.”
“Nowadays, if you have any document other than a census paper or passport, you absolutely cannot rent a house. We are always afraid that the landlord will cheat us or that at night someone will call the police and deport us, leaving all our money and household belongings behind.”
“Because we do not have identification documents, they do not rent houses to us. Either we have to pay more to an agency or rent a house under the name of a relative who has documents, like a census card.”
A mechanism is underway that is inherent in the economic policies of the Islamic Republic and its collusion with capital. This mechanism not only forces the Afghan worker to work at least 12 hours a day but also sets their wages below the minimum wage approved by the Ministry of Labor, allowing the Iranian employer to increase their profit; when the worker demands their wages, they see the employer as an accomplice to the very laws that, under any pretext, threaten them with expulsion from the country or so-called “deportation.” They must pay more for housing while constantly living in fear of being evicted from that home, and their housing deposit is confiscated by the landlord due to their “illegal” status and not returned to them.
This mechanism not only suppresses the Afghan worker in various ways but also, with calculated subtlety, creates a deep divide between them and the Iranian worker, turning their class peers against each other. Before the twelve-day war, the image of the Afghan worker in the media and official discourse was often accompanied by labels such as “illegal,” “criminal,” or “job stealer.” This image, which did not emerge spontaneously within the working class and oppressed groups and has no organic connection to the material conditions of the oppressed, but is rather an ideological construction, provided society with the necessary license to humiliate the Afghan subject.
“Insults in the street, the market, or even at work have become normal for us Afghans. Some Iranian coworkers openly said, ‘These Afghans have taken our place,’ and even pressured the employer to fire us. If a mistake happened, they would immediately say, ‘You Afghans are always this stupid and illiterate.’ Many times in the street or shopping centers, when they realize you are Afghan, they insult our ethnicity and race with a mocking tone; words like ‘Barbari’ (referring to a type of bread stereotypically associated with Afghans in Iran), ‘hairless,’ or worse insults that are hard to repeat. Children are not safe in the neighborhood or at school either. Taunts, humiliation, and extortion are common. Even when you want to go somewhere by Snap or taxi, they first ask if you are Afghan. When we say yes, they say, ‘You Afghans, it’s obvious from your faces, and many of you wear old clothes.”
“Many times in the neighborhood, when buying from the supermarket or bakery, I was harassed because I’m Afghan. At work, they bullied me, especially the foreman or Iranian workers.”
The neoliberalism of the Islamic Republic creates and exploits a divide between the “included” Iranians, who still believe they are secure, and the “excluded” Afghans; it owes part of its survival to this very divide. This ideological image not only diverts the anger of the Iranian working class away from capital and its allied state apparatus but also prevents the formation of class solidarity between Iranian and migrant workers. The slogan “Employer, have mercy, let go of the Afghan,” which was displayed on banners by the “House of Worker” during the International Workers’ Day ceremony in Tehran in 2015 and widely covered by the media as a representation of the working class’s demands, is only one example of the Islamic Republic’s efforts to create division among the oppressed. We have not forgotten that the “House of Worker” was occupied in June 1979 by the thugs of the worker wing of the Islamic Republican Party, of which Ali Rabiei and Hossein Kamali were prominent members. Ali Rabiei became Minister of Labor in Rouhani’s government, the same government that authorized the “House of Worker” to hold the International Workers’ Day ceremony in 2015, and Hossein Kamali served as Secretary-General of the “House of Worker” from 1981 to 1989 and as Minister of Labor under the Rafsanjani and Khatami governments.
These processes ultimately lead to the formation of something that manifests itself in discourses such as a “national demand” instead of a “class demand,” and after the twelve-day war, as “national unity” instead of “class unity.” The call for the expulsion of Afghans, whether framed as a national demand or as an inseparable part of cross-class national unity, conceals internal divisions and aims to restore dignity to the homeland and its nation. This discourse is not the desire of the oppressed but a command issued on one hand by Ali Khamenei under the title of “national unity” and on the other by Reza Pahlavi under the title of “national cooperation.” However, the goal of both is one: to preserve the status quo through various forms of covert violence to control the oppressed; to wear them down and to persuade both the included and the oppressed to collude in this policy.
July 30, 2025
Comment here