Scholars highlight the weakness of organized labor in post-revolutionary Iran. In doing so, scholars generally make either of two arguments, for each relying on different sets of historical sources. Firstly, historians have used leftist and oppositional materials to show how the post-revolutionary state repressed autonomous workers’ councils after 1979. Secondly, scholars have used elite-centric sources to argue that populist discourse and politics undergirded labor’s quiescence in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
By contrast, this article uses quantitative and qualitative data from a range of both official and oppositional archival sources from the 1980s and 1990s to revisit the relationship between labor and the state in post-revolutionary Iran. In consulting these sources, I read against the archival grain in order to highlight how labor actors navigated and forged new relations to state institutions.
I mobilize the concept of corporatism to look at the development of labor-state relations in post-revolutionary Iran. I argue that the 1979 revolution and the 1980–88 war led to the organization and vertical integration of industrial labor into the state. Contrary to mainstream scholarly opinion, I propose that labor unions helped to construct the post-revolutionary welfare state.
As the ruling party fell apart in the early 1980s, breakaway cadres re-organized themselves into a labor union close to the state, called the Workers’ House. Through participation in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), the Workers’ House was able to penetrate into major industrial companies by forging extensive ties to shop stewards and work councils. I show that these work councils were themselves organizational leftovers from the revolution. The vertical integration of union and work councils secured labor’s inclusion into the country’s first post-war ruling coalitions, setting off long-term path dependencies that continue to structure contentious politics and employment relations in Iran today.
