Over the past several months, and intensifying in December 2025, Iran has seen a widening wave of labor strikes and protests driven by worsening economic conditions. Inflation remains above 40 percent, with food and housing costs rising even faster, while wages, especially for contract and informal workers, have failed to keep pace. Sanctions, currency depreciation, fuel shortages, and repeated cuts to public spending have sharply reduced real incomes. Large sections of the working class now face delayed wage payments, insecure contracts, unsafe working conditions, and declining access to social services, creating a situation of persistent economic pressure rather than a single crisis event.

The most significant recent actions have occurred in the oil, gas, and mining sectors, which remain central to Iran’s economy. In early December, thousands of contract workers at the South Pars gas complex in Asaluyeh protested across multiple refineries, with work stoppages and coordinated demonstrations involving workers from different subcontractors. Around the same period, workers at the North Drilling Company halted operations on several onshore and offshore rigs. These actions followed earlier strikes in mining, including walkouts at the Zarshuran gold mine, as well as protests by steelworkers in Hamadan and industrial workers in Fars Province. While exact participation figures are difficult to verify due to media controls, reports consistently indicate multi-site coordination.

Workers’ demands have been relatively consistent across sectors. They include wage increases indexed to inflation, regular and timely payment of wages, improved safety standards. In oil and gas, contract workers have also demanded standardized work schedules, limits on arbitrary dismissals, and an end to exploitative subcontracting systems that divide the workforce. Retirees and public-sector workers protesting alongside industrial laborers have emphasized pension payments, healthcare access, and protection against further cuts.

In Iran, independent unions are illegal and formal collective bargaining does not exist. There are no recognized opportunist labor parties or legal strike frameworks. Instead, coordination occurs through informal worker councils, online networks, and semi-clandestine labor organizations, such as associations of contract oil workers and independent labor activists. These bodies do not function as political parties and generally avoid explicit ideological programs, focusing instead on economic demands. The state treats such coordination as a security threat, responding with surveillance, arrests, intimidation, and pressure on workers to return to work.

Despite the absence of legal recognition, these worker organizations increasingly function as de facto class unions albeit immature and absent a formal centralized organizational apparatus, precisely because their illegality forces them to operate beyond narrow workplace or craft boundaries. In the absence of formal collective bargaining, coordination has generalized across sites and sectors through informal councils, strike committees, and shared communication networks. Oil and gas workers, miners, steelworkers, transport workers, retirees, and public-sector employees have repeatedly acted in parallel, sometimes explicitly referencing one another’s struggles. While these organizations remain immature and lack centralized leadership or a coherent union program, their form already reflects a class-wide orientation rather than the fragmented, enterprise-bound unionism typical of legal labor regimes. This development is not ideological but material: repression and subcontracting have stripped workers of legal channels, compelling them to organize on a broader, more solidaristic basis.

Strikes and protests in Iran have also grown in frequency and scale over recent years, indicating a rising level of militancy despite harsh repression. Since at least 2021, repeated waves of contract-worker strikes in oil and petrochemicals, miners’ walkouts, teachers’ protests, and retirees’ demonstrations have shown persistence rather than episodic unrest. The state has responded with arrests, surveillance, dismissals, and the deployment of security forces at strike sites, treating labor action as a threat to national security rather than an economic dispute. In several recent cases, including at South Pars and major mining operations, security forces have attempted to block gatherings, pressure workers individually, and intimidate organizers. These confrontations underline the central contradiction: while no revolutionary party or unified leadership has yet emerged, the working class is increasingly compelled into open confrontation with the state simply to defend its conditions of existence. The movement remains fragmented and vulnerable, but its trajectory points toward greater militancy and wider generalization as economic pressures deepen and repression hardens.