This paper explores the transformations of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s dominant narratives on labor between 1979 and 2009. By analyzing official May Day speeches of this period, it navigates... Show moreThis paper explores the transformations of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s dominant narratives on labor between 1979 and 2009. By analyzing official May Day speeches of this period, it navigates multiple constructions of workers’ roles, which were systematically propagated by the IRI’s Supreme Leader and president over time. The analysis relies on the following primary sources: from the 1979 May Day sermon, pronounced by Ruhollah Khomeini, to the 2009 speech given by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, together with messages sent by Ali Khamenei, Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Showing how workers’ role—understood as a collective and distinct group—was gradually minimized, this paper argues that a bottom-up cleaning up process slowly purified May Day. In fact, the IRI progressively neglected workers as (revolutionary) social actors and interlocutors, as it stopped talking to masses and started speaking to middle classes. Show less
The formation of the wage laboring class in the Iranian oil industry during the first decades of the 20th century is studied as a tangled global-local social history. The analysis seeks to... Show moreThe formation of the wage laboring class in the Iranian oil industry during the first decades of the 20th century is studied as a tangled global-local social history. The analysis seeks to situate the oil complex in Iran within the interlinked contexts of the global transformations of World War One, the social and political-economic tumults of the interwar period, the changing geopolitics of the Persian Gulf and Anglo Iranian relations, the consequences of the 1921 coup d’état in Iran, the local transformations of the oil rich province of Khuzestan, and the urban histories of the oil mining town of Masjed Soleyman and especially the refinery and port city of Abadan. As petroleum was becoming the primary raw material of Fordism and the second industrial revolution the accumulation of capital in oil required the dismantling of existing social structures and the reassembly of resources, technical expertise, and populations in modern built environments designed for oil capitalism. The urban social history of these oil cities shed light on the contentious processes that led to the making of an industrial oil working class, as well as the formation of modern state institutions in Iran, and the Anglo Persian Oil Company Show less
