Labnet: CFP: "A Social History of Labour in the Iranian Oil Industry, 1908-2008", workshop at IISH, Amsterdam, 12-13/12

[labnet at lists.labourhistory.net]

>From : Reza Jafari (rja at iisg.nl)

Dear Colleagues,

The International Institute of Social History (IISH) is directing a
workshop on the project "A Social History of Labour in the Iranian Oil
Industry, 1908-2008." The workshop will take place in Amsterdam on 12th
and 13th December, 2008. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 15th
October, 2008 and the organising committee aims to finalise the workshop
programme and notify abstract-senders by 31st October, 2008. The IISH
will cover the cost of travel and accommodation expenses for those who
present papers in the workshop.

http://www.iisg.nl/research/global-black.php

This project, which is in the preliminary stages of background research
and planning, has been inspired by a major programme on Global Labour
History at the IISH, and the associated discourse that has been
developed by debates over the past few years. Evidently, over the past
three decades, the monopoly of European and North-American labour
historiography has been challenged by the growth of studies on labour
history in Africa, Asia and Latin America. However, developments in this
terrain have been very slow concerning the Middle East in general and
Iran in particular. This project seeks to fill this critical gap.

By exploring themes related to the formation and development of working
class within the Iranian oil industry; this workshop aims to investigate
three thematic strands. First, it seeks to discuss intensively relevant
methodological and conceptual underpinnings as well as historical
perspectives as an area of enquiry in constructing a social history of
labour in the Iranian oil industry. Second, it intends to examine,
interpret and analyse primary sources as well as the context in which
these sources were generated. Third, it attempts to map as many relevant
connections and relationships as possible and to place the case of Iran
in a comparative framework, leading to the formulation of a
well-reasoned set of arguments about the historical process of Global
Labour History. 

Please send your abstracts or any further enquiries to:

Touraj Atabaki (tat at iisg.nl) or
Reza Jafari (rja at iisg.nl)
International Institute of Social History
P.O.Box 2169
1000 CD Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 6685866
Fax: +31 20 6654181

Abstracts should be sent as PDF or MS Word documents and should include
full contact information and a brief academic biography. 

The project abstract:

As a strategic commodity, petroleum requires various labour and
production processes. While oil exploration, pipeline construction and
maintenance require a physically scattered labour force, the industrial
processing and refinery of petroleum, on the other hand, demand
long-term physical concentration of labourers, and the formation of a
disciplined and highly skilled industrial labour force. Evidently, the
discovery of oil in Iran in 1908 created new social, political, economic
and even cultural realities at local, national and regional levels.
Hence, the study of oil as a commodity can offer insights into labour
formation and labour relations in quite diverse settings, including
mining, transport, industrial processing, housing, social and urban
services. 

Besides, the formation of working class within the oil industry in Iran
has been subject to fundamentally shifting international demand and
reaction (such as international crises, and in more recent years, OPEC
price hikes and international embargoes), constant technological
innovations and skill requirements (the training of native skilled
labourers and managers being a by-product), and political relations of
production in a highly sensitive and strategic industry. Nonetheless,
there is no single and continuous history of oil as a commodity, and the
oil workers as a unified and coherent social class in Iran. What is more
evident is the fact that there are no known accounts or analyses of
social actors, or of the social and political relations of production
within oil sector, in the period after the early 1980s. As detailed
historiography of the oil working class, this project will consider
these discontinuities. 
 
The oil industry in Iran has been formed within the network of several
intertwined formative relations that have undergone major changes over
the course of the 20th century. Industrial labour relations in Iran,
especially in this most important industrial sector, have been crafted
by these series of changing relations between the national state and a
major colonial and entity (Anglo-Persian Oil Company 1908-1935,
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company 1935-1954, British Petroleum, 1954-present),
between the national state and a consortium of multinationals
(1954-1979), between the national state and the local and national
labour power employed in the industry, and between the oil company
(whether run by colonial and multinational corporations, or the national
state) and its employees. These relations have, therefore, affected both
labour formation and labour relations in substantially diverse ways and
levels, at different historical junctures.
 
In spite of its global, strategic and critical significance, the social
history of oil and the labour force which produced it has been an almost
completely neglected subject in Iran. The existing historiography of oil
has thus been limited, almost exclusively, to firstly, the economic
history of oil as an export commodity, and of petroleum as an economic
sector and secondly, to the mostly political memoirs and professional
reminiscences of elite actors (such as managers, ministers, party
activists and leaders), mostly about the oil nationalisation movement of
the early 1950's or the OPEC and related issues prior to the 1978-1982
Revolution.

Similarly, the labour history of the oil industry, with very few
exceptions, has been limited to the history of organised labour unions
and/or labour strikes and protest actions, and to the role played by
various political groups in mobilising labourers, mostly prior to the
nationalisation of oil industry in 1951. The social life of the working
class within the oil industry has not been the subject of any
independent study (with one or two exceptions only), despite its
critical importance to a better understanding of Iranian social and
political history, as well as the social history of petroleum as a
commodity.
 
Yet, this neglect is not the result of difficulties with sources. For
instance, the BP Archive, held at Warwick University, contains a vast
amount of material relating to every aspect of the life of its
workforce, not only the labourers, skilled and unskilled, but also the
developing Iranian clerical and managerial layers. The Company archives
document in detail and for a period of nearly fifty years, such matters
as the social and ethnic origin of its workers, their conditions of
employment and their reactions to their new circumstances, their
housing, their entanglement with pre-existing social actors such as
local tribal leaders, money-lenders, and so on, their relations with kin
and family, either present with them or left in home villages, and the
impact on the surrounding society of the arrival of this new migrant
labour.
 
However, this neglect can be partially traced to a general neglect of
social history within Iranian historiography. There are also a number of
significant theoretical positions that have conspired to limit the
attention paid to the historiography of labour in the oil industry. The
influential theory of rentier state has led to the uncritical belief
among social scientists that the disproportion between state revenues
from petroleum and the size of this industry compared to the industrial
sector in general implies that the labour power engaged in the oil
industry is a negligible force. 
 
In fact, despite its relative decline over the course of the past
century, the working class employed in the oil sector continue to be the
largest sector of the industrial working class in Iran. Moreover, the
conceptualisation of the oil workers as a labour aristocracy, coupled
with the decline of independent syndicates under the monarchic absolute
rule (1953-1979), and the physical destruction of most of the major oil
industrial installations in the province of Khuzestan during the
Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), and the forced dispersal of established
workers and organisers, have led to the neglect of any systematic study
of the social history of this working class. Last, with the increasing
ideological hegemony of neo-liberal theories, many social scientists
have gravitated toward focusing on the spheres of circulation of
commodities, and on market relations, rather on social agents who formed
the backbone of the industries and were active in the production of
these commodities.
 
Despite these neglects, the study of the formation, structure and
development of the working class in the Iranian oil industry is of
critical significance. In many fundamental ways, the commodity oil, and
those producing it, has played a central role in shaping a model of
development, of social mores and behaviours, of political and social
relations in Iran, and afar. The oil workers in Iran had to be created
and formed from a local society without any experience or history of
manufacturing, modern industry, and industrial time and work discipline.
The long and sustained effort to shape, and then maintain such a large
labour force was a tremendously complicated affair which affected all
aspects of the culture and social relations and power structures at the
local, national and regional levels.



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