The Oil industry and its derivative sectors have been the largest productive sectors of the Iranian economy from the turn of the 20th century. Oil workers have played a formative role in shaping the contemporary Iranian modernity, from the formation of the modern nation state to the particular manners in which the national economy, social geography, and public culture have been institutionalized. Those working in the sprawling petroleum sector - technical staff, providers of services, and laborers- have constituted the largest segment of the industrial workforce and, throughout Iran's turbulent recent history, have been among the main agents of change during the defining moments of political crises and transition. Yet, in recent decades, and especially after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, a discursive trend has emerged in the public spheres of academia, mass media, and policy-making circles that not only negates the continued pivotal significance of laboring producers in this vital industry, but also actively undermines and works toward fragmenting and dismantling labor’s attempts at collective bargaining at the workplace, and to have a voice in pressing social, environmental, legal, and political-economic issues related to the sector. This paper will analyze the changing politics of labor relations in the Iranian oil industry since the 197 revolution. More specifically, I will analyze four inter-related domains that have worked toward fragmenting the labor process: First, the structural industrial re-organization of production and refining that includes the privatization of upstream and midstream operations. Second, the legislative changes to labor laws intended to reduce job security by casualizing work contracts. Third, the spatial transformation of the urban built environment of whereby historical company towns such as Abadan have been increasingly undermined and marginalized by the fallout from military conflicts, under-investment, and massive demographic change, and replaced by highly policed and controlled new company towns with more shallow and vulnerable social networks of solidarity. Last, a relentless neoliberal discursive framing of the industry as an economic and technical sector where the pivotal role of working producers is either dismissed, or is rendered systematically invisible. This paper is part of a book project of the social history of labor in the oil industry, and is based on extensive ethnographic and archival research.