From Tehran to Shiraz, coordinated worker protests reveal systemic economic failure and the collapse of trust in the Iranian regime
On Wednesday December 10, 2025, Tehran and several major cities became the scene of a rare convergence of labor protests that went far beyond sector-specific demands.
What unfolded was a concentrated eruption of long-suppressed anger rooted in structural economic dysfunction, paralyzed lawmaking, and a widening gap between the Iranian regime and society.
The simultaneous demonstrations by energy-sector workers, social welfare employees, and importers of basic goods exposed not only a crisis of livelihoods, but a broader collapse of confidence in official institutions.
At the center of the day’s protests was the gathering of nearly 1,000 contract workers from the oil and electricity sectors outside the Iranian parliament. These workers demanded the dismantling of the contractor-based employment system and the implementation of the long-promised “employment status conversion plan.”
Their slogans captured a profound sense of betrayal: laws passed on paper, they argued, have become tools for indefinitely postponing justice rather than delivering it.
One chant—“Injustice against us is clear; why is the law abandoned?”—summed up the experience of a workforce caught between legal promises and lived reality.
Another, more biting slogan—“Bullets, tanks, fireworks; contractors deserve them”—served as a metaphor for a hidden class war in which contractual workers are squeezed to protect the profits of intermediaries.
When protesters cried out, “Enough oppression; our tables are empty,” poverty itself was transformed into political language.
Parallel to these protests, demonstrations by employees of the State Welfare Organization revealed a different but equally alarming dimension of the crisis.
Workers tasked with caring for society’s most vulnerable groups disclosed that they themselves now live under acute financial pressure.
One welfare employee, holding a master’s degree and with 15 years of experience, reported earning around 17 million tomans, while his official salary ruling amounts to just 13 million tomans.
These figures highlight the rapid impoverishment of Iran’s educated and professional class—individuals whose expertise no longer guarantees even basic economic security.
In Shiraz, employees of telecommunications factories raised a stark question: “How are we supposed to live?” They described months of unanswered demands, met not with solutions but with threats.
Their experience reflects a broader pattern in which labor grievances are systematically ignored or suppressed rather than addressed.
The scope of protests on December 10 extended beyond public-sector workers. Importers of rice gathered outside the Ministry of Agriculture to protest an 11-month delay in receiving government-allocated foreign currency required to import essential food items.
This prolonged paralysis underscores that Iran’s livelihood crisis is not merely a wage issue, but the result of structural failures in economic governance—failures that simultaneously punish workers and disrupt the supply of basic goods.
These demonstrations in Tehran formed only part of a nationwide protest map. From a three-day strike by steelworkers in Shadegan, to protests by contract workers in Asaluyeh demanding the removal of legal exemptions in labor law, to demonstrations by university entrance exam candidates who viewed recent regulations as discriminatory against the underprivileged, and protests by farmers in Karaj, the unrest cut across professions, regions, and generations.
Taken together, the events of that day stand as a living indictment of the Iranian regime’s economic policies. Rather than delivering justice or stability, these policies have pushed both laborers and professionals toward the margins of poverty.
The repeated chants of “oppression” and “empty tables” reveal a shared social vocabulary born of systemic exploitation.
What emerged on that single day was not a series of isolated protests, but a unified challenge to an economic order maintained by repression and inequality—an order increasingly unable to conceal its failure or contain the anger it has produced.
