The Persian Gulf Oil Refinery workers warned against the non-payment of workers’ salaries and threatened to demolish the sites at the refinery, Track Persia reports. Unfortunately, most of the several thousand workers in the refineries are poor and poorly educated rural people who are unaware of their primary rights.
“After the arrival of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in oil and gas fields and the country’s infrastructure, with the implicit mandate of Iran regime’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, for building a resistive economy during the former president Ahmadinejad’s era, the corruption center and economic leech house in the country, namely the headquarters of Khatam, was established, “ part of this announcement states.
During the first six months of this year, the situation has been catastrophic for the poor strata of the society: just like most non-oil companies and factories, most of the oil section force too have received only one-and-a-half percent of their salaries in the past six months.
At the beginning of October, there is such a lack of funds that the Star Oil Refinery companies, with a few thousand recruits, could not provide gasoline for two days for the activities of transportation cargo and machinery including cranes.
Workers in Rajai, Abad-e-Ra’ahan and South Tehran companies of the Star Oil Refinery have begun a peaceful strike over the past few days, but all they got from the company’s office were the bitter words that there is no money and that everybody that cannot tolerate that can just go away.
“Most companies of the refinery have closed down or half-closed due to the lack of funding. We, the workers of the Persian Gulf Star Oil Refinery, announce that in order to end the situation and endure this horrible summer without a salary, we will continue our protests peacefully only a week before October 5, and if our objections are not fulfilled, with apology to the honorable nation of Iran, we will break down and destroy the sites in the refinery,” the workers announcement says.
It is interesting to note that IRGC Khatam headquarters take the role of Iran’s major economic broker in Iranian economy by taking projects from the government and immediately transferring them to the largely inexperienced private sector and new emerging unskilled retail contractors, and engages secretly in circumvention and plundering of the country’s billion dollars budget.”
Besides the unpaid salaries, workers are facing even more serious problem. Stemming from political motives of the Iranian regime’s authorities to rapidly expand oil projects, they have removed the safety and critical facilities of oil refineries from their list of prerequisites, this way, the lives of workers and refinery personnel will be at risk due to the lack of work safety, Iran Freedom reports.
According to a report by the senior executive of the Persian Gulf Oil Refinery, describing the safety of the refinery, one of the engineers in this refinery, Ehsan Davoudi Jonghaei, lost his life in the past few days due to lack of safety. The report also reflects the 8-month wage arrears of at least 500 workers at the refinery.
The cause of the incident is the failure to install and make fully operational the F & G (fire and gas) detection system and (fire-fighting) or the fire extinguishing and warning system, which lead to the gas leakage not being detected, and engineer Davoudi following the shift changes at 19:00, faces gas explosion after entering the conex.
The senior managers of this mega project insisted on ignoring the fire safety and warning system to the extent that even the executives from the refinery’s startup contractor who had friction against such decisions, that is, speeding up the deadline for the completion of the project at the cost of the people’s lives, (former site administrator and former launch manager) were laid off.
It should be noted that the contractor for the construction and installation of the Persian Gulf Star Oil Refinery, Falat Faradast Energy, is affiliated to the IRGC’s Khatam Headquarters and there is no real leverage to pressure these companies to carry out the correct, high-quality and timely project.