On the morning of Saturday, August 2, 2025, Mohammad Omidi, a 26-year-old worker employed by the contracting company Pars-Sarma, hanged himself on the third floor of the Q4 platform at the Sadra Industrial Island and died.
He had months of unpaid wages. His colleagues said that shame before his family and the endless pressure of life had pushed him to the edge of collapse.

Sadra Company—one of the country’s largest builders of oil and gas platforms—issued a statement distancing itself from responsibility. The company claimed it had no debts to the contractor and that “all financial commitments were settled on time.” In their narrative, the worker’s death was nothing but a “personal incident,” and the responsibility belonged elsewhere.

Yet this very statement reveals the essence of one of the deepest labor crises in Iran:
the existence of contracting companies, designed to erase accountability from the shoulders of the main employers.

In today’s Iran, big capital—often the state itself through institutions like the IRGC, the Mostazafan Foundation, or the Executive Headquarters—uses contractors not only to swallow part of workers’ wages but also to remove itself from accountability, oversight, and even basic sympathy. In this arrangement, the big capitalist profits; the contractor profits; and the worker receives only the scraps of an exploited wage—if he receives it at all.

This is not just an economic matter;
contracting is a political tool.

For the state and its affiliated employers, this system builds a high wall between themselves and the workers:

• When protests erupt, they say: “You’re not dealing with us—go to the contractor!”
• When death strikes, they say: “He wasn’t ours—he worked for another company!”

Thus, the state-as-capitalist removes itself from the line of fire of demands and struggles. The contractor absorbs the blow, and in the end, everything is forgotten—except the poverty and grief of the worker’s family.

The suicide of Mohammad Omidi is a warning:

A warning about the anti-worker relations that prevail not only in Sadra but across most of the country’s major industries. From oil, gas, petrochemicals, and steel to municipalities and services, the pattern is the same:
middleman companies, workers without direct contracts, months of unpaid wages, no security, no rights, no protection.

And this lack of rights is justified and hidden—sometimes through silence, sometimes through repression, sometimes through pompous statements.

Organization or Desperation: Two Futures Ahead

In a society where the smallest rights and dignity in the workplace are trampled, and where every protesting voice meets repression and censorship, a worker left alone—without organization or support—is condemned to despair. And this despair sometimes ends in death, suicide, or explosion.

But independent organization is the only tool to change this fate.

Through organization, the worker ceases to be a passive victim of capitalist order and becomes a conscious, persistent, transformative force.

These deadly relations cannot be “reformed.” The political system itself owns the projects and industries, chains workers to contractors, and silences them through repression while blocking every path to real unionization.

Freedom from these relations requires a radical change of this order: the very structures that institutionalize poverty and exploitation must be fundamentally transformed.

Such change is possible only through mass, independent, deeply rooted, and nationwide organization.
The strength of workers and people lies in their unity.
Only then can they declare: we are no longer just victims of poverty and death; we are a force of transformation.

Editorial Board of Pezhvak-e Kar Iran (Echo of Iran’s Labor)