Where Life Reeks of Death: Working Women and Child Laborers
That cabinet minister of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s ‘Justice-Based Government’ who routinely engages in ribbon-cutting in opening ceremonies is singularly unaware that for rescuing the auto industry in this country, humanity has been trampled upon and squashed. Behind closed doors, there are weak and suffering people whose backs are shot through with pain and whose bodies get old and worn out right in the bloom of their youth so that the captains of the auto industry can supposedly rescue the ailing economy through high profit margins.
The loud pounding of metal sheets on steel pieces in the not-so-large workshop filled with tiny flying metallic filings and the rapid movement of small hands that have lost their elegance but still accurately pull out the formed pieces but, in a blink, a hand or a finger gets crushed or pounded, evokes Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. This is but a fragment of a game in which humans are parts of the machine and, in harmony with the cogwheel of the machine, take command without taking the command from the brain and, every pound has its own new command to that person: “Pound, pull, pound, pull.”
But the actors in these scenes are not Charlie Chaplin. They are enfeebled humans in real-life scenes. They are working children and family- running women on the backstage of Iran’s automobile industry. This show’s directors are the owners of capital, not from the Iron era but from the times of small-particle industry and 21st-century, in which a new slavery exploits suffering humans. This shop floor is 5 kilometers away from Arak City. The hands of women and children carry light and heavy parts and pieces of one of the automobile companies.
Quickly and stressed due to our uninvited presence, Sadeghi and Ahmadi, the stockholder and managers of this business, insist that their decision to take girls and women instead of more powerful man-labor is humanitarian in nature. They rely on their own justification instead of legal or logical rationalization but they unintentionally project facts that the official observers have not yet noticed. They say it is not breaking the law or going around them but is rather a natural by-product of the complex process of automobile manufacturing in Iran! Their explanation about why they hired women instead of men to exploit on the automobile production line of work and using children cannot be reduced to their being smart asses or fools since they brazenly say it out loud: “Men always yell at each other and argue, they use drugs and have hangovers, so lots of accidents happen when they’re working. When we protest their low productivity level, they grab our collar to fight… But since women fear losing their jobs, they don’t get into physical fighting. Their work accuracy surpasses men’s, since they work delicately.”
When we demand to see their workers’ contracts and pay list, again they say it with ferocity: “Before they tell you about it, we will say it out loud. They sign blank sheets, incomes are paid through the Labor Law and sometimes by hand and, we do not have a list of our past paying and receiving.”
When we look into their insurance list, which they ought to mail to Social Services, we see that there is everything based on Labor Law to prevent their being fined for cheating in payment to workers, but “receiving” is something else: between 40 to 150,000 Tomans [ about $150] and, as if surprised, they affirm this bitter truth, and to rationalize not paying women and children according to labor regulations they intone: “If you can do it better, here is the company, come and manage it. We are ourselves victims of this country’s Mafia. The artisans and large managers of auto production buy things from us for the same price it was in 2001, while there’s been inflation and the price of goods has gone up, as has the cost of living …”
The appetizing scent of lunch for managers, workers not getting their share of food.
Pleasant food in a small plant catches you but then, it aggravates our heartache when we hear from the managers saying: “Workers don’t have their share of food and, each one brings her own things.” That pleasant scent emanates from the kitchens of managers. In the workers’ lunch center — a 2×3 meter kitchen — everything is clean and neat and you cannot find a single piece of bread or a rice on the floor or around the table for four people. The kitchen’s (lunch center’s) door opens up to a narrow corridor in which the presumed dishwasher, hand-washing station and toilet are located and a young woman is washing the glasses in a narrow water flow line on which four faucets of cold water are designated.
An image of fear inside innocent simple looks
In a salon that is smaller than 100 square meters, all machines are working fast, full of rough and coarse sounds. Without any glasses, handkerchiefs or ear pads, teenage girls and young women are working, placing pieces under their instrument; exerting all their strength they pull up the lever of the machine and after its strong effect upon the car’s shield, they put it back on the line. Somebody uses grindstone, it gets flattened and after counting them in groups of 50, a young girl who is bigger than the rest hugs them all up strongly and hobbles toward the transportation car that is driven by a teenage boy. In the next salon, other, smaller parts are placed in packages in clusters of between 1,500 to 4,000 after being carefully counted and placed in a carton. A 17 year-old girl who is used as a vehicle places them in the other delivery machine that is driven by another young boy who drives it toward the transportation trucks. Tahereh is the most senior in this company, since she has been working here for seven years. But with a manager’s glance and signing, another son of another manager takes us to show us the commode that is full of tools and safety uniforms. He says workers are not using them, since they act careless with them! But then, at a moment when the manager is not around, full of fear he says: “We seldom have accidents, since comrades are very careful, so that nothing happens to them. But the work is hard and heavy. Delivering heavy boxes, metal particles flying in the air, exhaustion without breaks, hideous scents coming from scraping and using grindstone, is everybody’s pain. We have to work here due to the misery of the times. Most here are the breadwinners of their houses, with husbands incarcerated, jobless, addicted, daughters of old and broken fathers and what have you. And then asks us to swear: “Ms, for god’s sake don’t tell them what we’re saying — they’d fire us!
“This request is prayers for all who are in pain.”
Bureau of Labor: On contracts there is a legal vacuum. Mr. Movahedi, head of the provincial organization of labor and social matters, believes the legal vacuum in contracts in Iran is the main cause of having labor forces like this. “Since there is not harmony between demand and availability of labor force in the country, unfortunately such accidents are inevitable,” he says. Of this business and its use and abuse of cheap labor, Movahedi says: “That company has been visited and there are reports on that.”
He then points out unbalanced numbers between plant visitors and the number of plants themselves: “With 20 inspectors to check 30,000 working units and 180,000 workers, when we get such reports of course, we follow it up but, taking care of matters with such low numbers of inspectors is very hard to do.”
This part-producing company in Arak is just one example among dozens of in Iran where women and children, working in inhumane conditions for low pay, to maximize production, are exploited in the country’s auto manufacturing industry. But the Minister of Mines and Industry of the ninth and tenth government of the Republic took new cars from one of the two auto manufacturing companies of the country on Saturday September 29th and rents out about 20% growth, or human resources expenses, in our country at the same time that more productivity and fewer expenses are needed for production. Mehrabian says that the fixed price code inside manufactured automobiles has caused them to become more profitable, and by reducing essential parts and the price of materials, the cars’ prices are lowered in our country. Says the Minister of Mines and Industry: “The endurance of the car manufacturing companies saved the industry of our country!”
A minister of a government that considers justice its axis seems to be misinformed about the fact that in this great saving of the automobile industry, workers are stepped on and squashed, and behind closed doors, weak and people and their allies get old and rusty during their youth. Under this scourge, the country’s automobile production can supposedly be saved — of course with outstanding profits and vehicles whose price, counting wages, is much much lower than the price they are being sold for — tens of millions of Tomans [tens of thousands of US dollars] as they reach the buyer — so that government functionaries can continue bragging that the country’s auto industry remains on its feet.
Out of concern for the welfare of the workers in question,, we have not used the names of workers or the company. But this terrible news has reached all the provincial officials, the head of the province and… For obvious reasons this cruelty does not get exposed publicly.
