last for two weeks. Mediators are trying to convince the sides to accept a permanent agreement within two weeks. Each side, especially the United States and Iran, has a different account of the initial agreement.
In Iran, the official narrative is that negotiations will proceed based on Iran’s 10-point proposal. However, the United States claims that Iran’s proposal is unacceptable and that Trump’s 15-point plan will be the centerpiece of the negotiations.
In Iran, the cessation of deadly attacks that targeted industrial centers and land and rail crossings in recent days has eased the psychological pressure, if only temporarily. Details of the financial damage from the US and Israeli attacks on the steel, petrochemical and infrastructure industries have not yet been released, nor is it clear how much the attacks have increased the number of unemployed.
Farshad Esmaeili, a lawyer and legal consultant for labor and social security, wrote on the social network X on April 7, 1405: “Employees are not unemployed, jobs are destroyed.” He also wrote on March 8, 2020: “During these 40 days of war, thousands of people lost their jobs and thousands of people lost their businesses due to the internet outage. Connect the internet as soon as possible. The unemployment crisis has multiple irreparable social consequences.”
Online business owners also experienced internet outages shortly before the US and Israeli aggression due to widespread protests. This time, however, the outage has been prolonged. In an interview with Shargh newspaper, the managers of one of the two major online shipping service companies described the situation of startup companies as having “fallen three times” in one year; namely, the 12-day war in Khordad 1404 that began with the Israeli attack on Iran, the protests in January 1404, and then the US and Israeli attack on Iran in Esfand 1404. According to him, this situation “in addition to financial losses, causes unemployment of a number of workers. In this case, the possibility of support and many technical services is lost. On the other hand, all our new projects that required recruiting were lost and we faced a huge financial loss.”
Sharq newspaper quoted the manager of the online passenger company as saying:
“Because we have a major sponsor, we have been able to prevent layoffs until now. This is despite the fact that we know that many of the content and tourism production companies we worked with have stopped working, which will lead to serious layoffs.”
There are no exact statistics on the number of people employed in this sector, but in recent years, as industrial employment has declined, the number of people employed in what is called the “gig economy” has increased significantly. Farshad Momeni, an “institutionalist” economist in Iran, said in the summer of 1404 that there were eight million registered drivers employed on the Snap and Tipsy platforms. Tabnak also wrote, citing the Statistics Center of Iran, that in 1404, the number of people employed in online businesses reached 11 million. It is not clear how many of those employed in this sector have now become unemployed.
In recent days, some social media users, who, according to their own accounts, spent millions of tomans to buy a filter breaker to connect to the global internet, wrote that they had lost their jobs due to the war; restaurant and cafe workers, salespeople, repairmen, and journalists.
The Tehran Journalists’ Guild confirmed the dismissals in a statement without giving an exact number. The statement, released on April 10, 2021, said: “Field evidence and reports received indicate that in recent months, the intensification of financial problems of media institutions, along with a significant increase in production costs – especially in the field of paper and printing – a decrease in revenue sources, especially in the advertising sector, and disruptions in access to Internet communication infrastructure, have faced multiple difficulties in the activities of many media outlets. Meanwhile, communication restrictions and international Internet outages have had a deeper impact on the performance of online media. The interruption of access, the limitation of some communication platforms, the difficulty in publishing and distributing content, and the disruption of two-way communication with audiences have practically disrupted some of the main functions of digital media.”
The trade association further referred to the reduction in print media pages and the limitation of online media activity, calling the consequences of this situation “worrying” and causing “a wave of layoffs in March and April, which led to the unemployment of a number of journalists and media activists.”
“Everyone is unemployed”
Gig economy workers are not the only ones who have suffered from the 40-day war that may resume. The Shargh newspaper wrote in a report on April 10:
The wave of layoffs in various professions has reached its highest level these days; a trend that seems to continue even in the new year, and in the coming months we will face more people losing their jobs. However, there is still no specific statistics on the number of layoffs and layoffs during the peak days of war and internet outages. From flight attendants and journalists to bookseller and engineers who were working in technology companies and are now all staying home.
The report quoted human resources managers of large companies and groups as saying: “In order to survive, they have no choice but to reduce their workforce.” Labor rights consultant Maryam Zandedel also considered the firing of workers affected by the war to be “natural.” She said:
There are currently no statistics on the number of layoffs, but the war has been one of the main factors in the widespread layoffs in the country. On the other hand, the internet outage is a second factor that has caused some other jobs to stop. For example, when there is no platform for marketing, even large and well-known companies, it is natural for them to lay off workers in that department; as we know, this has already happened in many companies.
Fatemeh Azizkhani, an economist whose name appears in some reports by the Majlis Research Center, also stated on April 10 that even before the war, “the labor market was facing a kind of ‘chronic illness’,” and told “Eco Iran”: “The outbreak of the war, as an external shock, exacerbated and deepened the situation. Even businesses that were previously able to continue operating suffered a recession with the outbreak of the war. For example, sectors such as air transportation, tourism, urban transportation, and many businesses dependent on platforms such as Snap faced a decline or cessation of activity. The internet outage also had a direct impact on the activities of programmers and digital businesses.”
According to him, “construction, tourism, aviation and IT-based activities” are among the groups that have “suffered the most damage.” Azizkhani then said that disruptions in the internet network are one of the reasons for indirect damage to jobs, but “another part is due to direct damage to production units; for example, large industries such as steel and petrochemicals have been directly damaged and have lost part of their workforce as a result.”
Petrochemicals, steel, pharmaceuticals: devastating bombs
The United States and Israel targeted Iranian industrial estates from the very first days. The attack on the Payard flour and starch factory in Naghdeh killed 11 workers. The Tabriz bearing factory, the Qazvin glass factory, a manufacturer of cooling and heating equipment in Isfahan, the Arak Aluminum, the Pasteur Institute, Tofigh Darou, and a series of petrochemicals and oil tanks are among the industrial units that the United States and Israel destroyed with missiles and bombs.
Hadi Ahmadi, the public relations director of the Iranian Pharmacists Association, said on April 8 that the US and Israel directly and indirectly bombed 25 pharmaceutical production units and factories.
Government managers in the provinces have also reported the total or partial destruction of dozens of small and medium-sized production units in industrial estates. The newspaper “Deniya Eqtesad”, which is the unofficial media outlet of the “neoliberal” movement in Iran, wrote on April 9, referring to the consequences of the 12-day war that led to a drop in the number of employed people by 650,000: “The decrease in employment of 650,000 people among more than 24 million employed people, according to the latest announcement by the Iranian Statistics Center, is shocking.”
The report went on to point out that the war, which began with the “Israeli and American invasion of Iran,” has been prolonged, saying that “there are exacerbating factors that are effective in estimating the unemployment rate.” One of these factors is the duration of the war, which lasted 40 days—“more than three times the 12-day war”—which “has also led to a longer internet outage.”
“The World of Economics,” citing “some experts,” estimated that the 40-day war had left “two million people” unemployed. Earlier, Iranian domestic media had said that an estimated 100,000 jobs would be lost due to the attack on petrochemical plants. The “World of Economics” report estimated that: “Following the damage to one of the country’s largest steel complexes, which led to the halt of the production process, about 20,000 jobs were directly affected and over 50,000 jobs were indirectly dependent on it.” The report did not disclose the location of the complex, but wrote: “There were about 9,000 active businesses in the city where this complex was active, and about 5,500 businesses were dependent on this company.”
The Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare has announced that, based on the “wartime conditions” regulations, unemployed workers are eligible to receive unemployment benefits and has asked workers to register in the introduced system.
War against women
Women’s share of the Iranian labor market was very small even before the war; 12 to 14 percent compared to 60 percent for men. Many women worked in small workshops and informal jobs. Now, according to Azizkhani, they have suffered “the most.”
“There are no exact statistics yet published that would allow us to say with certainty whether women or men have been more affected. The current shock is also different. Many of the firms that were directly hit and lost jobs probably had mostly male employees. But the experience of previous shocks, such as the coronavirus or other crises, shows that women are usually the most vulnerable group,” he said.
“The bulk of the employment decline – whether due to power outages, layoffs by firms, or the shock of war – has been women,” the economist said, based on the seasonal report of the labor force census in the summer and fall. And for this reason, this time too, “women, especially female heads of households, are expected to be more vulnerable. Since a high share of women’s employment is in small and informal enterprises, it is natural that their level of damage, especially in terms of loss of income, is greater.”
The return to work of some unemployed workers may be quick, but in industrial jobs, especially in large enterprises that have suffered heavy damage and disrupted the production chain, the return to work will be prolonged; an issue that has the potential to become a crisis; especially since the inflation rate is also on the rise and the war has accelerated it. https://www.iran-tribune.com/n/ir/225