Iranian truck drivers have widened their labor stoppage to include more than 100 towns and cities across the country, while the clerical regime launched a violent crackdown on strikers in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj.
Iranian experts have long urged successive U.S. administrations to provide strike pay and other forms of aid to restive workers in the Islamic Republic, with a view to improving human rights and causing regime change from within.
Truckers are a key industrial force that helps keep the worsening Iranian economy above water.
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Alireza Nader, a Washington, D.C., expert on Iran’s regime who studies Iranian labor unrest, told Fox News Digital, “The Trump administration should offer loud support to the truckers-this would give Trump even more leverage in the nuclear negotiations. And organizations such as the AFL-CIO can play an important role in bringing the trucker strikes to international attention.”
The U.S. is engaged in talks with Iran’s regime to dismantle its illegal nuclear weapons program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Nader added, “The nationwide trucker strikes have the potential to paralyze the regime as it faces increasing vulnerability. The trucker strikes can be even more effective if other sectors of Iran’s economy go on strike, especially the energy sector and other transportation sectors.”
Many opponents of the clerical regime want the U.S. government to take a page from former President Ronald Reagan’s playbook against the now-defunct communist Poland via organized support for workers and their unions.
U.S. administrations cooperated prior to the collapse of the communist Soviet Union with the free American labor movement to inject democracy into trade unions in the largely closed communist societies.
The core economic issues animating the work stoppage, which started on May 18 in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas, involve working conditions and reduced insurance costs. According to the independent diaspora news organization IranWire, the spike in insurance coincided with a downsized medical care.
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The Union of Iranian Truckers and Heavy Vehicle Drivers is also demanding remedies for the lack of roadside aid for graft in the allocation of cargo.
The truckers are also seeking the amelioration of expensive spare parts, freight brokerage fees and diesel quotas. Greater security on the long stretches of Iranian highways is also demanded.
“A driver who protests for his bread and dignity is not a rioter,” the truckers’ union stated, adding, “Protest is not a crime, but our legal right,” reported IranWire.
Lisa Daftari, an Iran expert and editor-in-chief of the Foreign Desk, told Fox News Digital, “The latest nationwide truckers’ strike is not an isolated incident—it is only the latest manifestation of deep disenchantment among Iranians who are denied dignity and proper rights in every industry. Over the past 46 years, we have witnessed waves of protest across a patchwork of sectors and communities, each uprising pointing to a single, overarching truth: the Iranian people are not just sending a message to their government, but to the entire world, urging support in their quest for freedom and basic rights.”
She added, “This is a fundamental demand, but as history has shown, it is not easily achieved under a government that has proven itself incapable of reform or of delivering the life Iranians deserve.”
In 2019, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) urged Tehran to release detained workers’ rights activists. In 2018, the Teamsters Union, which represents most truckers in the U.S., issued solidarity support for truck drivers on strike in more than 290 Iranian cities.
