In Iran, street protests by workers or the disenfranchised are not rare. Since the nineties, workers have been protesting over pay, benefits, lay-offs, independent unions, and the effects of economic liberalization, which has left labor more fragmented, informal, and vulnerable. Today, some 80 percent of all workers in Iran are in insecure, temporary contracts. Perhaps a result, there were some 400 labor protests in 2015 and nearly 350 in 2016, according to a study by Kevan Harris and Zep Kalb at UCLA; there have been some 900 protests since March of last year, according to labor researcher Zahra Ayatollah. In the recent unrest, five labor organizations issued a statement calling for an “end to poverty and misery,” urging the government to undertake pro-labor reforms. Organized labor has clearly supported the protests, but the extent of its actual involvement is not known. [...]
The recent unrest, by contrast, came from neither the dissent of the traditional poor, nor the modern middle classes: According to the Ministry of Interior, over 90 percent of those detained were, on average, under the age of 25 and likely educated. Instead, recent events exhibited the revolt of the middle-class poor, the product of a large youth cohort, expanded education opportunities, urbanization, and aggressive economic liberalization.
There’s something paradoxical about this class. It holds college degrees; it is versed in social media; it possesses knowledge of the world; it dreams of a middle-class life. But economic deprivation pushes it to live the life of the traditional poor in slums and squatter settlements, and subsist on family support or on largely precarious and low-status jobs—as cab drivers, fruit sellers, street vendors, or salespeople. A member of the middle-class poor frequents the city centers, but lives on the periphery. He yearns to wear Nike shoes, but has to settle for cheap knockoffs. He dreams of working or vacationing abroad, but feels trapped by a dearth of money and the strictures of border controls. This is a class that links the world of poverty and deprivation, of shantytowns and casual work, of debt and precarity to the world of consumption, higher education, and the internet—to a global life. Its members are acutely aware of what is available in the world and what they painfully lack; their precarity and limbo are supposed to be temporary conditions, but in reality, become permanent. Feeling neither fully young nor adult, and filled with a profound moral outrage, this class is becoming a critical player in Iran’s radical politics. [...]
But even as education raised expectations, it failed to secure economic mobility, at least for the 2.5 million college graduates who currently remain without work. On the whole, 35 percent of educated youths are unemployed, according a parliamentary report. These people must bury their dreams of owning a middle-class home, for which they would need to save one-third of their monthly income for 96 years. Instead, many of them settle in the squatter communities, which now house over 20 percent of Iran’s urban inhabitants, according to 2014 study of 14 cities by Iran’s Ministry of Urban Development. With little money and poor housing, plans for marriage fade or are suspended—one reason why four million of Iran’s young college graduates at the traditional age of marriage remain single. Even though families in Iran usually help out their needy members, the shame of dependency and the general feeling of stagnancy make these adult youths exceedingly indignant. As the economy failed to create jobs for them and the government failed to protect them, these restless youth seemed ready to spark to revolt. The spark came with the Mashhad protests.
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