Iran: national trucker strike – militant workers and youth call for general strike

Since the 1st of Khordad, 1404 (22 May, 2025), Iran has witnessed a significant eruption of class struggle as lorry drivers and truckers launched a nationwide strike. This is a determined protest against intolerable working conditions and a spiralling cost of living crisis, highlighting the ever-deepening crisis of Iranian capitalism.

Within a week, the strike spread to 125 cities, and by the eighth day, the Union of Truckers and Lorry Drivers Associations of Iran announced that it had spread to over 135 urban centres. Strikes are now taking place in more than 140 cities. The movement was further bolstered by the solidarity of Nisandaran (pickup truck drivers) in the city of Neyshabur.

Since 2018, Iran has seen near constant protests and strikes, including a number of nationwide strikes and uprisings. This current mobilisation of a key sector of the economy serves as a fresh demonstration of the raging discontent in Iranian society, the working class' enduring power, and the regime's inherent instability.

The truckers' demands lay bare the harsh realities of the exploitation of Iranian workers. Their demands include: wages that can withstand inflation; relief from the crippling costs of spare parts, vehicle maintenance, and road tolls; the restoration of vital fuel subsidies (slashed from 3,000 to a mere 500 litres); and an end to the extortionate 220 percent increase in social security insurance, now a crippling 3.3 million tomans ($78 USD) monthly, with no tangible improvement in healthcare services.

The workers are fighting against conditions that threaten their very lives, as exemplified by the tragic Bandar Abbas port explosion in April where 57 workers were killed without any accountability for those responsible.

Workers are also protesting the parasitic freight companies and intermediaries whose commissions have been hiked from 13 percent to 45 percent, while the drivers' own freight rates remain frozen. Their declaration that “we no longer want to submit to this injustice,” resonates with the accumulated anger of millions.

The workers’ resolve has persisted despite state intimidation, pressure from the security forces, violent crackdowns, and the arrest of numerous drivers across provinces such as Isfahan, Hormozgan, Fars, and Kermanshah – including the well-known trucking blogger Shahab Darabi (‘Yuz Asia’).

The regime's predictable offer, through Reza Rostami of the National Freight Transport Association, to “review” some demands with potential for their implementation, is correctly viewed as a wholly inadequate attempt to defuse the situation, falling far short of the strikers’ comprehensive and just demands.

Each such struggle is a vital school for the working class. As Lenin noted, “Every strike strengthens and develops in the workers the understanding that the government is their enemy and that the working class must prepare itself to struggle against the government for the people’s rights.”

The workers have now begun to block highways, where they can stop strikebreakers and either win them over or shame them into leaving.

Workers of Iran unite

The truckers’ action is a particularly sharp expression of a much wider and deeper working-class and popular discontent.This sentiment is not isolated: bakers in Mashhad, who were met with tear gas while protesting the spiralling cost of living, made a statement that reflected the desperate situation that many face: “What do we want other than to lift the shame before our wives and children?”

Oil workers continue to mobilise, with Abadan refinery workers recently going on strike. There have also been protests by retired oil workers in Ahvaz; workers at the Sirri oil platform have fought against wage ceilings; and fired workers from Khuzestan Steel's Zamzam 3 project and the Hoveyzeh gas refinery have been demanding reinstatement, decrying “false promises”.

Retired telecom workers in several cities are actively protesting pension injustices. Teachers, nurses, defrauded homebuyers, women resisting discriminatory laws and extortion, the movements among all of these layers show that Iranian society is simmering with anger against “poverty, discrimination, repression... looting, and embezzlement” as described by a statement from students in solidarity with the workers.

A joint statement of support for the truckers’ strike has been issued by pensioner unions and trade unions such as the Council for Organising Protests of Oil Contract Workers, the Nurses' Protest Organising Council, and teachers unions, among others. The statement reads:

We support the nationwide strike of truck drivers!

The strike of truck drivers, this hard-working sector of the country's service workers, began on June 1st in protest against the difficult working conditions, the increasing deterioration of living conditions, back-breaking inflation, and their accumulated, unanswered demands, and is ongoing in 125 cities today, on its seventh day.

The problems of truck drivers are the pain and suffering of all of us workers and the people… We share a common pain.

High prices, lack of supplies, poverty, corruption, repression, theft and looting, and slave-like exploitation, our common voice raises the demands of the workers and the deprived people of this society.

Today, one of the country's major crises is the power outages that have brought society to a standstill and unleashed a tsunami of high prices, unemployment, and absolute poverty. A complete power outage has now been announced for next month. These are all the topics of our people's protest. The nationwide protests of bakers are also on the same issue. They cut off and increase the price of fuel, goods become more expensive, and then they blame the bakers for the high price of bread.

We are told that the ‘transport mafia’ has made truck drivers miserable, and the bakers are the ‘bread mafia,’ a smokescreen that all workers and ordinary people see through.

We, the signatories of this statement, declare:

We firmly support the truckers' strike and their just demands, and we condemn any repression and aggression against them.

The United Alliance Against Poverty and Corruption.

A nationwide strike is our solution.

It is precisely the Iranian capitalist crisis – the product of decades of capitalist exploitation, systemic corruption, and the impact of imperialist sanctions – that relentlessly erodes living standards. Even the regime admits that a majority of Iranians live in poverty, but they do not admit that they have been enriching themselves to the extent that Iran has the 14th largest number of dollar millionaires in the world.

The result of this has been a resurgent class struggle since 2018, with an unprecedented number of strikes in the 46-year history of the Islamic Republic. Yet since the defeat of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising in 2023, the struggle has been stuck in a dead end. Most strikes are isolated to a single workplace and are short-lived. Even the nationwide strikes isolated to a single sector have led to nothing but empty promises and arrests. It has increasingly become clear to the advanced layers of Iranian workers that a general strike is the only way to win even their most basic demands.

A campaign for a general strike would require a generalised programme to win over the working class in its entirety. Such a programme would base itself on the demands of the workers in the past few years including: living wages and pensions that scale with inflation, renationalisation of all privatised companies under workers control, workers control in the state-run economy, the immediate renewal of insurance and the reversal of all austerity measures.

Since the defeat of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising in 2023, the struggle has been stuck in a dead end / Image: Darafsh

The absence of a leadership with a clear programme at the head of the workers’ movement has allowed the liberal-monarchists in exile – propped up by a section of western imperialism – to present themselves as allies of the strike. Their ‘support’, however, only gives ammunition to the propaganda machine of the Islamic Republic, given that the Iranian working class rightly despises this reactionary, pro-imperialist ‘opposition’.

However, these upsurges of worker militancy are fueling radicalisation, with some activists, like the students quoted, seeing in these struggles the "coordinated heartbeats in the advance of a revolution" and the "next phase of the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution."

The strategic importance of the transport sector is undeniable. As the student statement notes, "Stopping transportation means paralysing the regime's economic artery… This is the nightmare that the regime fears." This highlights the potential power of a truly generalised strike.

While such revolutionary aspirations are significant and healthy, the path from widespread discontent to the successful revolutionary overthrow of the regime is complex and requires more than spontaneous outrage. Past waves of protest, though powerful, have shown that the regime, while shaken, can often ride out the storm in the absence of a clear revolutionary leadership and strategy.

The burning question: the necessity of revolutionary leadership!

The youth have an important role to play in building the alternative revolutionary leadership that the working class needs. They have already been at the forefront of the class struggle, taking part in uprisings and even building revolutionary organisations. Several of these organisations have signed a joint statement:

Forward to the general strike, forward to the overthrow of the Islamic Republic

We, the signatories of this statement, expressly declare:

No demand can be realised under this corrupt and oppressive system. Truck drivers and bakers, workers, women, students and pupils, nurses and artists, and all the oppressed, deprived and exploited layers have a common enemy. They are the links in the chain that can bring this government to its knees. Therefore, the current strikes are a clear sign of the deepening of the next phase of the Women, Life, Freedom revolution; a path of no return towards a general strike and the complete paralysis of the system.

We strongly support the truck drivers' and bakers' strikes, and we consider them not merely union-related, but part of a political and nationwide struggle to reclaim bread and life.

We consider the right to protest, strike, assemble, organise, and join political parties to be self-evident and inalienable rights, and we condemn any repression and propaganda against them.

We believe in solidarity and organising, and we emphasise the necessity of networking and expanding activist groups in neighbourhoods, workplaces, schools, universities, and hospitals.

We consider it essential to expand the strike to other sectors and to generalise it. Today, more than ever, it is vital that teachers, workers in the production and service sectors, nurses and medical staff, businessmen, shopkeepers and sellers, students and high school students, by forming councils and coordination cells and holding simultaneous strikes, to strengthen the common front against the common enemy and to pave the way for a general strike.

We, the signatories of this statement, call on all progressive opposition forces and movements aligned with the Women's Revolution for a Life of Freedom:

Call for a complete boycott of the Islamic Republic by governments and international organisations, just as the world dealt with the racial apartheid regime in South Africa;

Take action to expel the Islamic Republic from the International Labor Organisation (ILO) and other international institutions;

Turn the struggles of the Iranian people into a universal outcry in international forums.

They correctly identify the systemic nature of oppression: “No demand can be realised in this corrupt and oppressive system… all oppressed, deprived, exploited sectors have a common enemy.”

However, revolutionary spirit and militant action, while essential, are not sufficient. The student statement, for all its revolutionary zeal, calling for the “overthrow of the Islamic Republic,” also reveals common weaknesses within nascent movements. It shows a tendency towards idealism without a clear, class-based programme, and an underestimation of the organised political and ideological tasks required.

Opportunistic, reactionary forces, like Reza Pahlavi and his monarchist backers – promoted by western imperialism as a ‘respectable’ alternative – always seek to capitalise on such movements / Image: Gage Skidmore

Calls for international bodies like the ILO to act, while reflecting a desire for external support, can foster illusions in institutions that are fundamentally pillars of the imperialist world order. The only true friends that the Iranian working class have are the workers of the rest of the world. To seek support on the stage of imperialist forums and institutions is a mistake. Were such ‘support’ forthcoming, it would only weaken the movement, as it would arouse distrust among many workers.

Opportunistic, reactionary forces, like Reza Pahlavi and his monarchist backers – promoted by western imperialism as a ‘respectable’ alternative – always seek to capitalise on such movements. The Iranian working class, however, has a bitter history with the Shah's dictatorship and instinctively distrust these attempts to turn back the clock to another form of bourgeois rule.

The crucial missing ingredient in past struggles, and the one that remains paramount today, is a hardened revolutionary communist party, deeply embedded in the working class, armed with a Marxist program.

A genuine communist force would patiently explain:

1. That the immediate economic and democratic struggles are inseparable from the fight to abolish capitalism.
2. The necessity of complete political independence of the working class from all bourgeois and pro-capitalist forces.
3. The class character of the Islamic Republic as a capitalist state, and the interconnectedness of the struggle against it with the struggle against global imperialism.
4. The imperative of building a disciplined vanguard party to unite the advanced workers and revolutionary youth, providing the strategy and tactics needed to navigate the protracted struggle towards workers’ power.
5. The vital importance of international proletarian solidarity, linking the Iranian workers’ fight to the global movement for socialism.

The current truckers’ strike is a significant battle, not the final war. It is a painful lesson in the class struggle, exposing the regime’s vulnerabilities and tempering the fighting capacity of the proletariat. For revolutionary communists, the task is to learn from these struggles, to patiently explain the need for revolutionary theory and organisation, and to diligently build the forces capable of leading the Iranian working class to seize power when the conditions for a revolutionary crisis fully mature.

For a revolutionary communist party in Iran!

Death to the Islamic Republic!

For a Socialist Republic of Iran as a part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East!