Retirees Continue Gatherings Protesting Neglect of Legal and Economic Demands

FCNN EditorJanuary 24, 2022

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A number of retirees from the Steel Fund and pensioners and benefit recipients from the Social Security Organization in several Iranian cities held gatherings protesting the neglect of their legal and economic demands, chanting protest slogans.

Retirees from the Steel Fund in several major cities continued their weekly routine of holding protest gatherings, emphasizing that pensions of four to five million tomans are insignificant compared to runaway inflation and do not provide for their living expenses.

These protesting pensioners and salary recipients have long been holding various gatherings in front of the Steel Fund building in Tehran, Isfahan, and Khuzestan, demanding that pensions be raised to the minimum poverty line, access to free medical treatment, and reform of equalization decrees.

According to available reports, the Steel Fund and similar retirement funds, despite government resolutions and approval by the boards of trustees of these funds, are refusing to fully implement the equalization plan.

The government has approved that the Steel Retirement Fund and similar funds should implement the equalization plan with their own budgets and approval of their boards of trustees, but the Steel Fund is not complying with the full implementation of this resolution. Today, protesting retirees from the Steel Fund in Tehran chanted slogans such as “If there were one less embezzlement, our problem would be solved.”

Based on videos published on social media today, Social Security pensioners and benefit recipients also gathered in Mashhad, Tabriz, and Rasht, protesting the non-implementation of salary equalization and demanding attention to their economic demands and meager wages.

Social Security retirees in Rasht have long emphasized their demands for limiting government intervention in the Social Security Fund, real equalization, and fighting inflation and price increases, and in today’s gathering chanted the slogan “A cry against all this injustice.”

A protest gathering was also held in Tabriz in this regard.

According to official statistics, approximately three million people in Iran live in absolute poverty, and about sixty percent of Iran’s population is below the poverty line. The economic crisis and runaway inflation in Iran in recent years, aside from retiree protests, have led to dozens of protest gatherings by teachers and workers, which in some cases have been met with severe suppression and arrest of labor activists by security agencies.

Source: Voice of America

FCNN Editor

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