Social Security Organization Faces Tens of Billions of Tomans Budget Deficit for Wage Payments
Hadi Aboui, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Workers’ Trade Unions, announced a shortage of resources at the Social Security Organization for paying salaries and wages in 2022, and asked the parliament’s reconciliation commission to pay special attention to this issue.
On Thursday, the 14th of January, in an interview with ISNA news agency, he reported a seven-month delay in social security payments to medical centers and predicted that the organization would face a monthly budget deficit of 11 trillion tomans next year to secure its resources.
Hadi Aboui said about the current situation of the organization: “The Social Security Organization pays more than 17 trillion tomans this year for pensions and retirees’ salaries, and has a monthly liquidity deficit of between 5 to 6 trillion tomans for wage payments.”
The secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Workers’ Trade Unions announced the Social Security Organization’s debt to banks due to securing the shortage of paid salaries is currently more than 90 trillion tomans and said that it appears this debt will reach more than 135 trillion tomans by the end of June of next year.
Stating that the Social Security Organization faces numerous problems, Hadi Aboui proposed that 150 trillion tomans be allocated to this organization in the next year’s budget bill either in cash or in the form of share offerings and property sales.
Unifying retirees’ pensions and settling government debts and liabilities to the Social Security Organization are among other matters that Hadi Aboui has asked the parliament’s reconciliation commission to address.
In recent months, a number of retirees in various Iranian cities have repeatedly held protest gatherings to oppose their poor living conditions.
The main demand of protesting retirees is to receive pensions commensurate with the average cost of living for a four-member urban household and to reform pensions at the level of 12.5 million tomans as a base salary and living basket.
The crisis of living conditions and runaway inflation in Iran in recent years, aside from retirees’ protests, has led to dozens of protest gatherings by teachers and workers, which in some cases have been met with severe suppression and detention of labor activists by security agencies.
Source: Voice of America
