Government Fails Iran’s Seven Million “Loafers”

Thirty-nine-year-old Rajab is sitting on a stone bench in northern Tehran. He is looking for work, any kind of work, whether in construction or moving furniture. He has two children to support.

“For the past four days I’ve been here every day at eight o’clock each morning,” Rajab says. “But there is no work. In winters there are usually fewer jobs, but it’s never been like this.”

I ask him if he works throughout the year. He smiles bitterly. “There is no work for even a week, let alone for a whole year. For three years I was a mechanic’s apprentice, but the guy packed up and moved away. I’ve gone to a hundred places, but they already all have apprentices. I don’t have the capital to open an auto repair shop. What can I do? I come here and wait for some construction work, but can’t find any. I have to watch the grass grow. If they could create jobs for us, then they would see whether we want to work or not.”

I tell Rajab that a government official has recently referred to people like him as “loafers.”  He responds in anger:  “Damn his own loafer ancestors! When have I loafed? If I were a loafer I would go and lie down in bed.”

The Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, Hossein Taee, recently referred to Iran’s seven million unemployed as “loafers” or “idlers.” The ministry is responsible for job creation. But, according to Taee, people do not want jobs: they are not interested in gaining skills or finding work.

“Outside of Iran, these people are referred to as Not in Employment, Education, or Training — or NEET,” Raee says. “It covers people who look for a job for a while and then disappear without a trace. We call them loafers.”

“People who have lost their jobs but are still looking are called ‘unemployed,’ whether they have the necessary skills or not,” says Ali Akbar Mehdi, professor of sociology at California State University in Northridge, speaking to IranWire about Taee’s statements. “To say that ‘sometimes they look for work and sometimes they don’t’ is confusing the issue — and misleading.”

Mehdi, who specializes in human rights, social movements and Iranian history and has written widely on Iranian society, says that, by referring to unemployed people as “loafers,” the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs is not only insulting those unemployed, it is holding them responsible. He takes issue with the minister — a senior official tasked with tackling these problems — using such a term. “Humiliating the unemployed harms the morale of workers who are looking for work,” he says.

The Iranian Center for Statistics uses a different term. Those who fall outside the simple categories of “employed” or “unemployed” are designated as “economically inactive.” However a person can be in employment but be deemed “inactive” if, for instance, an individual works only a hour a week. Official unemployment rates for the country do not include members of the economically inactive.

According to a 2012-2013 Center for Statistics report, “economic participation” is at its lowest in the provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan near the border with Pakistan, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad in the southwest, and Semnan in the north, at 28.3 percent, 29.6 percent and 31 percent respectively - unemployment figures are highest in these regions. If the population of the so-called “loafers” is taken into account, the figures for unemployment climb significantly.

Mohammad and Alireza, both 27, live in the underprivileged Javadieh neighborhood of south Tehran. They sit beside a motorcycle, taking in their surroundings. Every now and then, they exchange a few words.

Mohammad dropped out of high school a year before getting his diploma. He used to work in a large furniture store. “I had an argument with my employer over pay and I quit. At 600,000 tomans ($215) a month, they pay you slave wages. I decided it wasn’t worth it and so I left.”

I ask him if he is looking for another job. “For about four months now, my uncle has been telling me he will find me a job,” he replies. “But there’s nothing as of now.”

Mohammad says that he gets by somehow — on the pension his mother receives because his father died, as well as government subsidies. “It’s not so bad,” he says with a laugh. “We sit here and rest a while and we wait for the kids to come so we can play football. Don’t you worry about us.”

Alireza joins in: “In my view, a job should be a proper one, not miserable. If you agree to take any job that comes along, you end up a loser.”

Secretly Unemployed

Professor Mehdi has his own term for Iranians who have given up looking for a job: the “secretly unemployed.”

“This category includes those individuals who do work, but are in a job that has no relation to their skills,” he says. “In other words, individuals who have no other choice. Sociologists consider such a person to be ‘secretly unemployed’, even though they do not show up in the ‘employed’ economic statistics. We also use the terms ‘stable employment’, ‘productive employment’, ‘defective employment’ and ‘false employment.’ Most economists include the first category in the ‘employed’ statistics because these people work and have incomes, regardless of whether their work is not what they are trained to do, or whether it is illegal, erratic or unstable.” It is important to remember, Mehdi says, that sociologists look at work in terms of whether it is “effective” or “healthy,” “but this is an analytical evaluation,” he says, “not a statistical one.”

Iran’s Deputy Labor Minster has warned that “loafers” hurt the country’s job market — and, ultimately, the economy. But he has been less effusive on what his ministry is doing to change this. What are the ministry’s responsibilities toward people like Rajab and Mohammad? How can it turn government policy toward offering people training and give them the necessary skills to make them employable?

“In developed countries with well-organized economies, the governments and/or the job markets take responsibility to train the workforce,” says Professor Mehdi. “When the government says that these individuals lack skills, that there is no way they can acquire them or apply the skills they already have, or that these people are unemployable, this only exposes its own shortcomings, and the failures of the country’s economic institutions.”

Morteza, who has been running a grocery store in Javadieh for the past 20 years, complains about the young people who roam aimlessly around the neighborhood. “God knows we are sick of it,” he says. “They have no jobs. From nine in the morning to dusk they just mill around, causing problems. I beg the government — if it wants to do something useful, it should do something for these young people. If we can’t find jobs for them, the country will go up in smoke.”