Posted on 07/19/2008 5:04:58 AM PDT by nuconvert
Iran's Brutal Labor Crackdown
New York Post
Amir Taheri
A year ago last Saturday, Ali Khamenei ordered the abduction of trade-union leader Mansour Osanloo. In so doing, Iran's top ruling mullah hoped to kill in infancy the independent trade-union movement that Osanloo had launched in '05 with the help of colleagues among bus drivers and conductors in Tehran. A year later, Osanloo is still in prison, sentenced to five years on a charge of "undermining the security of the Islamic Republic." Yet the free-union movement that he inspired has spread like wildfire.
Transport workers in Tehran and its suburbs have refused to disband their union and rejected the mullahs that Khamenei appointed as their leaders.
Workers in the auto, construction and petrochemical industries have set up their own independent unions, as have teachers, miners, dock workers and bakers. The Workers Organizations and Activists' Coordination Council, an umbrella group for the free unions, now boasts more than 700 groups across Iran with almost 2 million members.
Earlier this month, the 6,000 workers of the Haft-Tapeh sugar plantation and refinery, the Middle East's largest, announced their own independent union after a year of strikes and demonstrations that led to violent clashes with security forces and the arrest of 20 trade unionists.
Osanloo is kept in the dreaded Evin Prison, where the Islamist regime locks up those it fears most. In a statement relayed by his family, he accused the authorities of "systematic mistreatment, insult and abuse." Suffering from an eye infection and a heart condition, the union hero isn't permitted proper medical care.
Despite "intense psychological pressure and physical hardship," he has refused to call for a dissolution of independent unions and a return to mullah-controlled "Islamic labor associations."
Labor is fast emerging as the biggest threat to the mullahs' rule.
sorry I forgot the link. not awake yet
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07172008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/mullahs_v__workers_120264.htm?page=0
Labor unions helped bring about the fall of communism. Lech Walesa may have taught this guy something?
Surp[rise! Surprise!
Osanloo has been referred to as the Iranian Lech Walesa
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