Workers's decrease of purchasing power should be revived; Ali Rabiee

“Ali Rabiee”, Iran’s Minister of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare told 17th Tehran Worker’s House convention that wages have a lot of distance with their ideals.

He stressed that in the previous year, the government tried to compensate for the wages that were lagging behind the inflation rates.

Pointing to the decrease of the worker's and retirees' purchasing power, the top government official stressed that we need a refined and articulated strategy to yearly revive the workers’ lost purchasing power.

Currently, the index (workers’ purchasing power) has been reduced 67 percents while in the previous year, the year we had 35 percent of inflation rates, the worker’s wages had only increased 9 percents.

Referring to a report in this area, the minister told that unfortunately, due to the implementation of the past policies, the country’s economic and production deteriorated and now, the vast numbers of the country’s workers are working in Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME).

Emphasizing that the workers’ place should be stabilized in relation to social and economic situations, he added that we should move in a way that the worker’s assets in Social Security Organization would not get affected, however the parliament also has organized an investigation proposal in this regard.

At the end, Rabiee stressed that the worker unions should make themselves stronger and more independent.