Labor unions' Iranian opportunity and responsibility
Western workers' organizations must counter Tehran's hostility toward independent activists
By Stuart Appelbaum and Benjamin Weinthal / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, July 15, 2013
Afshin Osanloo, 42, jailed Iranian labor activist and political prisoner, who died in notorious Rajai-Shahr Prison in the city of Karaj. Photo via the International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran.
On June 20, less than a week after the election of Iran's new president Hassan Rowhani, the 42-year-old Iranian trade unionist Afshin Osanloo died under mysterious circumstances in prison. Times are extremely tough for struggling independent labor activists in Iran.
Iran's notorious hanging judge, Abolqasem Salavati, sentenced Osanloo in 2010 to five years in prison for his effort to exercise employee rights in a country where independent unions and meaningful worker rights are non-existent. His tragic fate mirrors the death of the 35-year-old blogger Sattar Beheshti, who died while in police custody last November.
The court accused Osanloo of "collusion and assembly with the intent to act against national security." In other words, Iran's rulers raised bogus charges to criminalize democratic union activity.
Sohrab Soleimani, the head of Tehran Province Prisons, claimed Osanloo "died after a heart attack." But his sister, Fereshteh Osanloo, told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that "my brother did not have any heart conditions. He was well. He exercised in prison every day. He had an in-person visit with my mother two weeks ago. My mother said that Afshin was healthy and doing well."
In an ominously written letter to international labor federations last August from prison, Osanloo captured the desperation and dogged optimism among working class Iranians. His appeal aimed to spark action from human rights groups and international organizations to stop Iran's violent crackdown on independent union organizing efforts.
"We want you [The International Transport Workers' Federation and International Labor Organization] to tell them how in our country we have no labor or human rights, and how unjust and illegal it all is and how the smallest complaint about our working conditions causes us to be severely tortured and imprisoned," wrote Osanloo.
The deceased truck driver Osanloo knew his subject matter from personal experience. Iran's security agents incarcerated him in the notorious Evin prison. "For five months I was kept in solitary confinement and was interrogated and tortured," wrote Osanloo in his prison letter.
The plight of Iranian political prisoners like Osanloo has not spurred major human rights action from the U.S. Instead, intense Western attention has been devoted to Rowhani, who hails from the inner circle of Iran's anti-Western supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a new president who can help the Iran engage the West.
The Islamic Republic's repression forced Mansour Osanloo, the brother of Afshin and viewed as "Iran's Lech Walesa," to flee Iran in May because of his independent union organizing activity. He sharply rejects the West's one-dimensional focus on Iran's nuclear weapons program at the expense of union and civil democracy promotion.
After all, Rowhani played a critical role in the violent suppression of Iranian student protests in 1999. Iranian students, like their counterparts in the pro-democracy union movement, sought to obtain democratic rights. Rowhani took pleasure in carrying out the regime order to "crush mercilessly and monumentally" the student demonstrations.
In short, Rowhani (former secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council for 16 years) has long been part of a brutal security apparatus that vehemently rejects the kind of economic and political democracy that Iranian trade unionists desire.
Rowhani's fundamentalist theocratic outlook will not move beyond the deeply embedded Islamic Labor Councils, which serve as a regime-controlled body to crackdown on independent union activity. Iran's anti-worker laws allow the supreme leader to appoint representative to sham worker organizations. According to an Iranian human rights group, "over the past three decades, the track record of Islamic Labor Councils and their central body, the Supreme Labor Council, has been in favor of management and its policies."
It is worth recalling that the U.S. labor movement took the international lead in the 1980s to aid the Polish shipyard worker Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement to breath democratic life into communist-controlled unions. The result contributed to the dissolution of communism in Poland.
American labor unions are in a unique position to replicate the cold war Polish model of international solidarity. There is no shortage of pressure points to influence a change in Iran's behavior.
Western trade unions can symbolically adopt imprisoned Iranian labor activists as a way to spotlight the need for their release.
International trade union federations can issue resolutions condemning Iran. Human rights groups can ratchet up the pressure to show that Iran's violations of labor rights mean repression of human rights. That would be a start to fill the words of Afshin Osanloo's letter with meaning, content and action.
Stuart Appelbaum is president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union representing workers throughout United States. Benjamin Weinthal is a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and member of the journalist's division of the German union Verdi.