The protests of teachers and employees of the Ministry of Education in Iran have not stopped for months, and are repeated from time to time in various cities, calling on the authorities to find solutions to their difficult living conditions affected by the steady inflation and the rising prices that prey on their lives. They demand fair legislation and court procedures in this regard.
Today, teachers in various Iranian cities resumed organizing rallies and vigils, demanding the release of detained teachers, rejecting what they called the “incomplete approval” of the job classification law for teachers recently approved by the Iranian parliament.
In the city of Shiraz, the capital of Fars Province in southern Iran, the security forces resorted to violence to break up the vigil in which thousands participated, and continuous reports from other Iranian cities indicate that the security forces are trying to confront the protests.
According to the videos published since Thursday morning on social networking sites, hundreds of teachers in Iranian cities chanted slogans such as “Get up, teacher, abolish discrimination” and “release the imprisoned teacher,” and protested the way the authorities dealt with their demands, which they described as an attempt to unite. their demands rather than finding a radical solution to them.
Two days later, Parliament held the largest protest rallies for teachers in more than 80 Iranian cities on Monday, December 13, and on Wednesday, December 15, Iranian lawmakers ratified Article 6 of the Teachers Job Classification Law in order to increase teachers’ salaries and benefits after the draft draft had been waiting for 18 years. Parliament’s decision, during this long period, continually demanded that teachers meet their demands by organizing rallies and protest rallies.
Several teachers, including Mohamed Habibi, a spokesman for the teachers’ union, responded to the law’s passage in Parliament as a parliamentary attempt to “pause the situation” and that the law did not meet the job classification requirement.
The protests of educational cadres at the country level also come at a time when the Iranian government is facing many economic problems, due to the economic sanctions resulting from its nuclear activities on the one hand, and corruption within state institutions on the other hand.
According to the Iranian Statistics Center, the annual inflation rate last November was about 44.4%, and according to official statistics carried out by the Iranian Ministry of Labor itself, the average price of more than 83% of types of food in Iran has crossed the crisis line.
