Notes from the [Post]War Days 7
August 14, 2025
In the following report, we will read an account from SnappFood workers who, during the twelve days that Iran was engaged in war with Israel and the United States, like many other workers who had neither the possibility of leaving the city nor the workplace, were experiencing two wars and two simultaneous assaults. If an end could be imagined for the twelve-day war and its bombardment between Iran and Israel–the U.S., for the second war, that is, the class war and the assaults imposed daily by the capitalist order, there was neither a pause during those twelve days nor after, nor is any truce expected to mark its conclusion. The crude meaning of the poetic displays of “national unity” that the twelve-day war evoked can only be understood in the ongoing class struggle. Workers, who feared falling behind on rent or installments, seemingly had to tie that fear to a fabricated sense of patriotism so that the private company Snap could continue receiving “top entrepreneur” awards during the bombardment and “commendations for Jihadi management” throughout the war. SnappFood workers, as well as employees of restaurants, bakeries, and supermarkets who had neither the option to stay home nor the means to leave the city, delivered food packages and purchases under the shadow of missiles to customers who were likely able to link their deep sense of patriotism from behind the window to the taste of pizza and cream cakes.
In this report, one SnappFood driver, under the pseudonym Hamid, from the Yusefabad district, recounts his experience working under wartime conditions.
Following this narrative, we will refer to a report recently issued by Snap, emphasizing that this report not only omits the lived experience of the workers but also deliberately ignores the gap between that experience (the narrative) and the official image of “success” and “profitability.”
A Snappfood Worker’s Account of the Twelve-day War
“In these wartime conditions, we were forced to work. There was no support, no insurance, no job security whatsoever. If we got injured in this situation, Snapp wouldn’t care at all, it wouldn’t take any responsibility. We’re working under slavery-like conditions. We’re being exploited, the share that Snapp earns, it doesn’t even give us one-hundredth of that, and on top of it, customers humiliated us. Many times, I delivered an order, the customer took a photo claiming it was damaged, sent it to support, and support told me, ‘Go pick up the order.’ When I went to collect it, I saw the customer had already eaten the cake. That meant money was deducted from my account. Many times, the customer damaged the cake themselves or a part of it was damaged, and when I went to collect it, they would say, ‘I already ate it, go sort it out with your support team.’ I would call support, saying, ‘You deducted from my account. The customer should return the unwanted product.’ I work a million tomans’ worth a day, how can the cost of a cake, say five hundred tomans, be taken out of my pay and I’m the one paying the price? In such cases, support offers no help at all, and the amount is never paid back to us.
Most customers were the type who had money, property, and earned around 200–300 million [tomans] per month. The people we were delivering for during this [wartime] period mostly earned 300–400 million a month, because their daily purchases, according to the work I was doing, were over two million tomans. The middle class hardly bought anything. Most of our customers were from Vanak Square and higher. Most of them would order bottled water and some other items, and we were providing services to them in those conditions.
Snapp, Tapsi, and all other online delivery services don’t even count as a day’s work. Especially under those conditions, with the internet cut off and the wartime situation. I was personally making deliveries in Vanak Square when an explosion happened just 500 meters away. I came to work in these conditions because I was in debt and paying rent, and if I didn’t work, I had no unemployment insurance. It was extremely hard, a very difficult experience, and the first time in my life I went through something like this. There were delivery workers who risked their lives just to pay their installments. Even in those conditions, when there was no GPS location tracking, they were working however they could, just to make a living.
To leave the city, first of all, I didn’t have any means of transportation. I’m forty years old now and have been working as a laborer for at least twenty years, and for the past five or six years I’ve been working in online delivery services like Snappfood. But I couldn’t leave here, because if I did, my wife and kids wouldn’t have had bread to eat. If I had left Tehran and gone to my hometown, I wouldn’t even have had the fare to come back. Under these circumstances, what would I have done about my installments? What would I have done with the bank I borrowed from? If I didn’t pay my installments, the bank would freeze my guarantor’s account.
In these conditions, I knew delivery workers who, even without GPS tracking, would still go to a spot hoping to get a delivery. When the GPS signal dropped, they would stop where it last worked, wait there, get a job assigned, deliver it, and then go back to the same spot again. This meant that the GPS location might register on a different street, possibly two kilometers away from where the driver actually was, and because the location had shifted, the courier had to go there and wait. So, for every order they delivered, they had to return to that spot to catch the next one, sometimes this meant going several kilometers away and then coming back empty-handed.
There were checkpoints, but they didn’t treat us disrespectfully. They searched us and said it was for our own safety. At one of the checkpoints, they even checked inside our phones, and because of that, we were also living in fear and anxiety.
Our income had dropped a lot compared to before the war. If before, we made about one million tomans a day, during the war we earned only around five to six hundred thousand tomans a day. Expenses are very high. I personally work fifteen to sixteen hours a day, hoping to make that one million tomans, without any insurance or other benefits. No health insurance, no support, no job security. If I collapse on the side of the street, the company takes no responsibility at all. And if you say anything or complain, they just block you and you’re out, and I don’t have any other job to go to”.
Snapp’s Annual Report
A quick look at Snapp’s latest annual report reveals how the structural violence and class oppression evident in the account above are hidden between the lines of its growth charts. As we mentioned, in recent days Snapp, the largest player in Iran’s ride-hailing and platform-based transportation services market, released its 2024 annual report. This report presents an image of growth in every aspect: a highly positive and successful picture of rising trip numbers, increasing users, and expanding services, from the most lavish-spending customer to the highest-earning user. But behind the gleaming numbers and growth graphs lies the hidden reality of workers’ lives: lives and labor that leave no trace in any official narrative.
The report is written as if it comes from a parallel world, and in fact, it does. While it makes no direct reference to the company’s revenue or the profits of its owners and top executives (three of whom are named in the report: Mehdi Khalaj, CEO of SnappCar, and Eyad Al-Kasser and Mohamed Fouz, the German-Saudi founders of the Snapp Group), the internal performance indicators and data it provides allow for a cautious estimate of the platform’s total revenue or sales volume. Although this text cannot claim to present an exact figure for Snapp’s income, it is possible to produce an approximate calculation that gives a general picture of its revenue scale. Even such a broad and cautious picture can offer a more realistic understanding of this economic phenomenon, especially when placed alongside the realities of the lives of the workers employed on this platform (some aspects of which were mentioned in the account above). Based on the data provided in Snapp Group’s 2024 performance report, the following financial and analytical estimates can be made:
According to Snapp Group’s 2024 performance report, the company’s annual revenue- based on a 30% commission from 1.51 billion SnappTaxi rides (with an average fare of 198,000 tomans per trip) plus income from other services such as SnappFood, SnappBox, and SnappMarket- is estimated at around 138 billion tomans (equivalent to 2.56 billion USD at the 2024 average exchange rate of 54,000 tomans per dollar). SnappTaxi accounts for about 70% of this revenue, with the remaining 30% coming from other services. This comes despite the fact that, although Snapp’s market share grew to over 90% by July 2025, the company experienced a 7% drop in revenue due to GPS disruptions caused by the war. Nevertheless, Snapp has maintained its position as the dominant player in Iran’s ride-hailing market, with 35.6 million active users and control over 88.7% of market share in 2024.
On this same platform, with its massive cash flow, couriers, motorbike riders, and drivers work without insurance, without contracts, and without even minimal job security, many of them under conditions resembling wartime, facing fear, insecurity, and desperation. Comparing these two sides of reality, the multi-trillion-toman revenues and the daily oppressive lives of workers is essential to understanding the economic and social gaps embedded in the platform’s structure.
The publication of annual reports by private companies like Snapp, especially in a non-democratic environment like Iran, where the media cannot engage in serious or sustained critique of corporate performance, and where, worse, the prevailing journalistic culture treats such critique as improper, often functions less as a mechanism of accountability and more as a tool for constructing a successful, entrepreneurial, seemingly participatory image. Charts, statistics, and narratives of “high earnings for couriers” or “employment growth,” which are prominent in these reports, serve two purposes simultaneously: legitimizing the exploitative structure of the platform and neutralizing the growing dissatisfaction and anger of the workforce. For example, the report presents accounts of drivers earning billions in a year, implying- through references to “high daily trips by couriers”- that this job can lead to financial stability. What remains hidden, however, is the intense work structure that makes such earnings possible: long working hours, job insecurity, lack of insurance, and continuous psychological pressure to increase the number of trips.
Reports like these not only distort reality, but by replacing “structural exploitation” with “individual error,” they effectively render class oppression and exploitation invisible. If a courier or driver fails to achieve high earnings, it is framed as their own fault for “taking too few trips” or “not working enough hours.” As a result, the exhausted, desperate worker directs their anger not at the system, but at themselves.
This kind of narrative-building can be understood as part of platform ideology: constructing an image of work as a free choice, while erasing all signs of domination and exploitation from the language used in these reports. Platforms like Snapp, as much as they reproduce the traditional structures of capitalism, also produce an ideological structure in language and media, one that makes inequality appear natural, competition seem necessary, and exploitation remain invisible.
In this context, the use of terms like “Snapp companions,” “partners,” or “user experience” is precisely aimed at erasing the conflict between labor and capital. The courier is no longer a “worker” but a “companion”; their relationship with the company is portrayed as voluntary, not unequal. The reality, however, is quite the opposite. The majority of drivers and couriers work under conditions where, to earn a minimum living wage, they must labor 12 to 15 hours a day under unsafe conditions, without insurance, and bearing the costs of vehicle or motorcycle maintenance themselves. In many cases, what they earn does not even cover daily fuel, repairs, and basic living expenses.
At the same time, while the company does not recognize any formal employment or legal relationship, it exercises control over its workforce through mechanisms such as rating systems, fines, account suspension, and invisible algorithms. This situation can be understood as a form of invisible wage labor, where exploitation is reproduced not through contracts but through “psychological incentives” and hidden pressures. Snapp’s annual report is designed precisely to conceal this relationship. In such a structure, couriers are even denied recognition as “workers.” There are no employment contracts, no fixed wages, and no minimum guarantees for continued work. Any demand or protest can be ended with a single brief message: “Your account has been deactivated due to violation of rules.”
Comment here