The extraction of oil in 1908 and the massive building plans of the oil refinery, shipping docks and company towns in southwest Iran opened a new chapter in Iranian labour history. Having enjoyed absolute monopoly over the extraction, production and marketing of the oil, the Anglo-Persian/Iranian Oil Company (APOC) engaged in a massive labour recruitment campaign. The company began to draw its recruits primarily from tribal and village-based labouring poor throughout a region. The work force was then subjected to the labour discipline of an advanced industrial scale, which eventually contributed to the formation of the early clusters of working class in modern Iran. The recruitment process of unskilled labours, however, soon turned to be not as smooth as it was anticipated. In a region where the human needs were few and cheep, it was not easy task to persuade young men to leave their traditional mode of life in exchange for industrial milieu with radically different work pattern and labour discipline. Therefore, in the formative years of the oil industry in Iran, the function of the intermediary individual, locally known as sarkar was not only to conscript the new labour force for the expanding industry, but also to ensure their loyalties to their new tasks. A dual mission, both a recruiter, and later a foreman. The aim of present study is to review the practices of labour recruitment and labour formation in the formative era, when the fledgling oil industry was first taken shape in Iran. By utilising the narratives of individual workers, the APOC and the Iranian National Archives, the present study intends to examine the positions of sarkars, in recruiting the unskilled labour for the new industry. Considering the adverse working environment, the question is what melange of coercion and inducement were made by the sarkars in order to uphold the labour recruitment and engagement. In other words, this paper investigates the role played by local intermediaries in creating a modern proletariat and wage labour force in a social setting where it did not exist before. Once a permanent wage labour force was consolidated, the function of the local sarkars gradually faded in favour of a formalised “Labour Office”, directed by the oil company. This paper analyses the local impact of this bureaucratisation of labour recruitment, which saw an end of the intermediary role of local agents in transforming their fellow tribesmen into a modern proletariat.

This paper is an analysis of the ebbs and flows of the social and political agency of oil workers since 1977. In the course of the Iranian revolution mass labour strikes in the petroleum industry played a decisive role in the eventual collapse of the monarchy. The subsequent expulsion of the multinational oil companies and the full nationalization of the petroleum industry under the fledgling and often-contentious control of workers councils and a new political regime set a new precedent among oil producing countries. The paper investigates the important questions of why this new found workers’ political agency was lost, how autonomous and coherent were the workers’ demands and their sense of collective cohesion to begin with, and what kind of organization and political-administration of the labour process replaced the workers’ councils after the revolution. By analyzing the histories of labour in the Iranian petroleum sector since the 1979 revolution this paper will investigate the dynamics of social class relations in post revolution Iran, and explore the state-society relations as a contentious and over determined process. The paper will also challenge the prevailing rentier-state theories which negate the social and political role of oil workers and technical experts and staff, by focusing exclusively on oil as a source of revenue rather than a complex set of social and political relations. To investigate the dynamics of labour relations in the Iranian oil industry this paper will analyze three important and interlinked events and processes: First, the geographic and ideological impact of the Iran-Iraq war is analyzed as a key turning point when the oil and port cities of Abadan and Khorramshahr were physically destroyed and their population involuntarily dispersed. Second, the authors will analyze the administrative restructuring of the oil industry in post-Iran-Iraq war era when economic efficiency, the rule of technical experts, and the primacy of the accumulation of capital framed the restructuring of labour relations. Third, the impact of this post-war restructuring on the casualization of labour force and the systematic dismantling of autonomous labour representation and organizations will be investigated.

The discourse of nationalization of oil became dominant in the 1940s in Iran. The hostility against the British exploitation of Iranian oil sprung from various sources. It was believed that Iran was not getting her fair share of benefit from its own oil. The working and living conditions of the workers were argued to be struck with a discriminatory hierarchy among the British and Iranian employees placing them in a colonial relationship in a non-colonial setting. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) was considered to be the sole responsible for the living and working conditions of the local workers according to the 1933 Convention, a responsibility it was seen to be neglecting. The workers' protests and strikes combined with the government's concern of taking its fair share from the oil industry ended up with the Musaddiq government's bill of nationalization of oil that was ratified in May 1951. The immediate reaction of the British government and its allies was to put an embargo on the Iranian oil. The embargo was followed by a CIA and British Intelligence Service sponsored coup of 1953 that put an end to the Musaddiq government. Following the coup, refraining from annulling Musaddiq's nationalization policies, the Iranian government decided to adapt a new policy towards its oil management. Given the hegemonic character of the nationalization discourse in the society together with the demands of the other international actors in the oil sector, the alternative came in October 1954 in the form of an Iranian Oil Consortium. The consortium was made of AIOC returning to Iran with a new name, the British Petroleum (40%), the Dutch Shell (14%), a group of American oil companies (40%), and the French Compagnie Française des Pétroles (6%) that would work together with the National Iranian Oil Company, which now owned Iran's oil deposits. This paper reviews the social setting of labour in the Iranian oil sector before nationalization and after the consortium take over. The working and living conditions of the workers in the late 1940s will be analyzed in compare and contrast with the living and working conditions of the workers after the setting of the consortium in 1954. The British Petroleum Archives, the UK National Archives and the Iranian National archives will be utilized to examine the changes in the labour recruitment policy and its effect on the ethnic and gender composition of the workers in the Iranian oil sector.

The “rentier state” has become one of the most commonly used concepts in Middle East studies. It has gained wide usage to characterize the nature of the state in those countries that receive, on a regular basis, substantial amounts of external economic rent in the form of oil-revenues, and to explain their economic, social and political trajectory. With the ascendance of democratization studies in the past two decades, rentier state theory (RST) has become particularly fashionable in explaining the lack of democratization in oil-exporting countries like Iran. RST provides three main reasons for why oil hinders democratization. First, oil-revenues make states autonomous from society and citizens become less inclined to demand accountability from the state and participation in decision making. ‘No taxation, no representation,’ is the assumption. Second, oil income provides the state the financial means to create a repressive apparatus that can be effectively used against those who do demand accountability. Third, oil makes obsolete the need for structural economic changes that are associated with industrialization, and which stimulate democratization by changing the class structure and creating an educated and specialized population. However, recent studies have questioned the claim that oil-revenue is an obstacle for democratization or have revised the causal mechanisms involved, arriving at new versions of “rentier state”theory. This paper revisits RST and the recent debates about its shortcomings and validity. Arguing that part of the problem of research on rentier states resides with regression methodology, leading to confusions about correlation and causation, this paper takes Iran as a case study for a qualitative analysis that critically engages with RST in its classic and new forms. The questions this paper aim to answer are as follow: What is the validity of generalizing RST to countries that except being oil-exporters vary in their economic, social, and political structures and their relations with the international state system and the world economy? What is the relationship between oil-exports, industrialization and Iran’s general economic development in a global perspective? Can state reliance on oil-revenues in Iran explain autocratic rule in a historical perspective? Does it for instance explain variation in the level of autocracy and the rise of pro-democratic movements in the 20th and 21st centuries? Do the mechanisms that according to RST explain the negative effects of oil-revenue on democratization, hold ground in the case of Iran?