Workers who have helped keep electricity flowing across Tehran during the war and a difficult summer of power shortages are now asking why their own livelihoods remain so precarious. Contract workers at the Greater Tehran Electricity Distribution Company say they worked under intense pressure as the capital’s electricity network faced both wartime demands and the country’s longstanding power shortage. Now, their representatives say many of those same workers are dealing with inadequate pay, heavy workloads and significant disparities in compensation compared with directly employed staff.
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“We kept Greater Tehran’s electricity stable during the war and the summer,” Mokhtar Vaezi - a labor activist representing contract workers at the company - told Iran’s ILNA news agency this week. He argued that officials who expect workers to maintain the stability of the power network should pay similar attention to the stability of their livelihoods.
The complaint comes at a particularly difficult time for Iran’s electricity system. The country entered the summer already struggling with a longstanding gap between electricity supply and demand, which has resulted in scheduled outages in Tehran and other cities. The war added another layer of pressure to a system that had little room to spare.
For the workers, however, the immediate complaint is about something that predates the fighting. Vaezi says contract workers carry much of the operational burden of the electricity system while receiving lower compensation and fewer benefits than direct employees. He also argues that intermediary contracting companies benefit from an arrangement that leaves workers with little influence over their employment conditions.
He challenged electricity companies’ argument that government regulations leave them little room to improve compensation. Iran’s electricity distribution companies have their own boards, he said, and those boards have some discretion over the allocation of resources. In his view, management has chosen not to use enough of that flexibility to improve workers’ livelihoods.
The dispute in Tehran is part of a much larger and longstanding argument over the use of contract labor across Iran’s public sector. The Iranian government says roughly 700,000 contract workers have been registered across government institutions. These workers can spend years working inside ministries, state companies and other public institutions while technically remaining employees of private contractors rather than the institutions where they actually work. The arrangement has generated years of complaints over job security, wages and benefits. Workers and their supporters in parliament have pushed for the removal of intermediary companies and direct employment relationships between workers and government institutions.
The issue has been before parliament since 2020. A plan intended to reorganize the employment status of contract workers was eventually approved by lawmakers, but its implementation stalled after objections from the Guardian Council and the Expediency Council’s High Supervisory Board. Government officials say some of those objections have been resolved, while others remain.
The Pezeshkian government has now chosen a more limited approach. Rather than converting hundreds of thousands of contract workers into direct government employees, the government has approved a new system under which their salaries and benefits will be paid more directly and subjected to greater government oversight. Executive agencies are required to register contract workers in a centralized administrative system, and payments to workers who have not been registered are prohibited.
Under the new arrangement, payments will be made through accounts jointly controlled by the government agency and the contractor, while competition among contracting companies is supposed to be limited largely to a management fee of around two to three percent. The stated goal is to reduce delays, increase transparency and prevent portions of workers’ compensation from being lost in the contracting process.
The government has begun moving the plan toward implementation. Aladdin Rafizadeh, Iran’s vice president and head of the Administrative and Recruitment Organization, said last week that contract workers would begin receiving their salaries directly in a manner similar to permanent and contractual government employees. The measure has also passed an important procedural hurdle. Parliament’s body responsible for reviewing government regulations approved the cabinet resolution in August, clearing the way for implementation of the new payment system.
But there is an important distinction between what the government has approved and what many workers have demanded: direct payment does not mean direct employment. Government officials say converting all 700,000 registered contract workers into direct employees is not currently possible. Zabihollah Salmani, deputy head of the Administrative and Recruitment Organization, has cited legal restrictions, including limits on government hiring and requirements to reduce the size of the public workforce. Formal government employment will also continue to generally require participation in competitive hiring examinations.
The financial implications are also substantial. Iranian reporting citing government estimates has put the potential cost of fully changing the employment status of contract workers at approximately 185 trillion tomans, adding another obstacle to a wholesale conversion of their contracts. That leaves the government trying to address some of the most immediate complaints without dismantling the contracting system itself.
The new rules could make a meaningful difference for workers if they prevent delayed payments, improve oversight and reduce the amount retained by intermediaries. But they do not resolve the broader questions of employment status, job security and disparities between workers performing similar jobs under different types of contracts.
For the electricity workers in Tehran, those longstanding grievances are now colliding with the demands of wartime. Electricity is one of the civilian systems whose importance becomes even more pronounced during a conflict. Hospitals, water systems, telecommunications, businesses and households all depend on a functioning grid. Electricity workers must also maintain and repair a network that was already operating under considerable strain before the latest fighting began.
That is what gives Vaezi’s complaint particular weight. He is not arguing that the war created the problems facing contract workers. He is arguing that workers who were already unhappy with their pay and employment conditions were nevertheless expected to keep one of the country’s most important civilian systems operating through the war.
The dispute also offers a different window into how Iran is absorbing the pressures of a prolonged conflict. Much of the discussion outside Iran about the country’s ability to withstand the war has focused on military capabilities: how many missiles Iran can launch, how much infrastructure has been damaged, whether its forces can continue retaliating and how long the government can sustain the confrontation.
But the ability of a country to function during a war also depends on much less visible systems, and on the people who operate them. For Tehran’s electricity workers, that means maintaining a strained power network while dealing with economic pressures and employment grievances that existed long before the first missiles were fired. The government has now begun addressing one part of those grievances by changing how contract workers are paid. Whether that will be enough is another question.
For Vaezi and the workers he represents, keeping Tehran’s electricity running through the war has strengthened the case they were already making: if their work is essential enough to rely on during a national emergency, they believe their livelihoods and employment conditions should be treated as essential as well.