On April 26, 2025, a few days before International Workers’ Day, a massive explosion rocked Iran’s Rajaee Port, causing extensive destruction to buildings and industrial facilities and inflicting at least 57 deaths¹ and well over a thousand injuries. Among the victims were racialized immigrant day laborers from the Baluch ethnic minority, many of whom are systematically denied official identity papers by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The following article, originally composed and published in Persian by Dasgoharān, a Baluch feminist collective in Iran, explores how the accumulation of capital via Iran’s most strategic logistical port is intertwined with the racialization and marginalization of Baluch communities, producing precarious work conditions and precarious lives.

We present this text as a continuation of our efforts to foster connections between social movements in Iran and movements confronting parallel challenges elsewhere around the world. The authors’ account of how the Iranian state keeps undocumented Baluch workers at the mercy of the capitalist class offers a useful perspective on current events in the United States and Europe, as well. The authors argue that creating undocumented populations under tremendous pressure from the state is one of the fundamental ways that governments serve the interests of capitalists, ensuring that a segment of the working class is vulnerable to intense exploitation. In 2017, in No Wall They Can Build, we made a similar argument about the role of undocumented laborers in the economy of the United States. In 2025, under Donald Trump, the assault on immigrants in the United States—both undocumented and documented—has intensified considerably; thus far, it appears that the chief goal is to terrorize them and render them more vulnerable.

The collective Dasgoharān was formed amid the Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (“Woman, Life, Freedom”) uprising in Iran. Their name refers to Dasgohari, an old tradition among Baluch women—a pact of companionship, solidarity, mutual aid, and sisterhood. It signifies that they, and no one else, will speak on their own behalf.

This text was translated into English by Zmedia, a bilingual independent alternative media platform that provides analysis, opinion, and background on critical events. Publishing in Farsi and English, Zmedia focuses on Iran, Afghanistan, and the broader Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).

Background

Located on the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, Rajaee Port, a special economic zone, is Iran’s largest commercial port, playing a vital role in the country’s logistics and security. It handles over 85% of Iran’s container traffic and approximately 55% of the nation’s total trade. The port is a critical node in both the logistical and military networks of the Islamic Republic, especially regarding the maritime branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In 2020, Israel reportedly launched a cyberattack that disrupted operations at the port, causing traffic jams of delivery trucks and delays in shipments.

As in previous catastrophic incidents, following the Rajaee Port Disaster, the state has systematically manipulated the reported number of casualties, abandoned the families of the victims, and failed to provide a transparent explanation of the cause of the explosion. Numerous rumors and theories circulated, ranging from claims of an Israeli terrorist attack aimed at delaying US-Iran negotiations to sabotage by the beneficiaries of US sanctions within the Islamic Republic ruling classes who oppose diplomatic progress. An emerging narrative links the explosion to Iran’s increasing reliance on China for critical missile fuel components following Israel’s airstrike on October 25, 2024, which significantly damaged Iran’s ballistic missile production capabilities.

Officially, Iranian authorities have attributed the explosion to the ignition of chemical materials stored at the port, denying the presence of any military-related cargo. Nonetheless, some reports suggest that shipments of chemical ingredients such as sodium perchlorate and ammonium perchlorate—key substances used in solid rocket fuels—were transported from China to Iran’s ports, including Shahid Rajaee. These shipments began arriving in January 2025 and were reportedly handled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force.

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From Precarious Work to Precarious Life

On International Workers’ Day, a pile of workers’ corpses has been left behind once again. Assaults against workers continue from all sides. The devastating shadow of war, military threats, and sanctions has not only made the living conditions of workers in countries like Iran increasingly unstable but also made organizing and social protest more policed and restricted than ever before. While sanctions and foreign intervention undeniably play a part in destabilizing the lives of working-class people, the overt oppression by “domestic” capitalists in Iran requires closer examination, particularly in the aftermath of the Rajaee Port explosion disaster.

Officials have announced that anyone with a missing person in Bandar Abbas should submit a DNA sample—a statement that indicates the high number of missing individuals at the Rajaee Port site. Evidently, the number of missing migrant workers is high, and there is little hope that the authorities will release accurate figures.

Rajaee Port enforces strict entry and exit controls. No person or vehicle can enter or exit the port without authorization. Everything passes through X-ray screening. Despite these strict regulations, no one yet knows what the “unauthorized containers” contained, or how many workers were killed. But we know well that many migrant workers lost their lives. It is suspected that the number of Baluch fatalities is much higher than reported. Since Baluch workers are primarily employed in manual labour and cargo handling in the port warehouses, it is believed that many of them were killed while on the job during the explosion. As of now, out of seventy¹ identified victims, eleven have been confirmed as Baluch.

Who Are the Baluch Workers at Rajaee Port?

The Shahid Rajaee Special Economic Zone—and Hormozgan Province more broadly—has become a major destination for many Baluch [migrant] workers. This is due to many things: the constant demand for cheap manual labor in the zone, its proximity to Sistan and Baluchestan Province (the home region of many Baluch workers), shared cultural and ethnic roots between the Baluch and the residents of Hormozgan, chronic unemployment in Baluchestan, and the criminalization of precarious means of survival such as fuel smuggling and cargo transport. These Baluch workers come from the most impoverished rural segments of the Baluch population. Most do not speak Persian fluently and work for the lowest wages in the sweltering heat of Rajaee Port during the most hellish days of the year.

One group of these Baluch workers consists of those who, despite holding bachelor’s or even master’s degrees, are employed in low-level jobs such as security guards at the port. Another group is made up mostly of day laborers without legal documentation [many of whom have no national ID or birth certificate due to the systemic denial of civil registration to Baluch minorities]. They enter the port through side entrances, such as the Gandami gate, or even by climbing over the wall, a fact that is not exactly a secret. These workers are not listed on any official records, and this makes it easy for employers to exploit them.

At Rajaee Port, although it is officially prohibited to hire workers without identification documents or military service completion cards, they can still be employed as day laborers. These workers are mostly engaged in manual labour, cleaning, cargo handling, and construction work. Those residing in the port’s own dormitories are generally registered workers. However, the unregistered workers—most of whom are Baluch and come from Iranshahr, Saravan, and surrounding villages—usually live in nearby rural areas.

Precarity: A Tool of Workforce Discipline

At the port, precarity serves as a tool for disciplining and controlling labor, one that is becoming more intensely utilized by the day. Precarious laborers cannot protest; their names are not recorded anywhere, they are not identified, and as a result, they are more easily exploited and excluded. Precarity is deeply interconnected with minority status—with being Baluch, being marginalized, being undocumented—which gives it an even more violent form.

Baluch day laborers generally live in villages surrounding the port, one of which is Khun-Sorkh. These migrant workers, due to sharing their Sunni background and Baluch ethnicity with some of the local populations, experience a form of solidarity with the residents that enables them to settle more easily.

Khun-Sorkh is a highly strategic location: it lies near the refinery, the steel plant, the water desalination facility, and the power plant; it is close to most workplaces. Historically, various illnesses have been widespread in the area, yet no accurate public reporting has ever been made, and there is no information on casualties. Of course, Khun-Sorkh is not lacking in luxuries: the large Persian Gulf Hotel, for example, is fully equipped to host those who feed off the blood of the working class. Because of its location within an economic hub, land prices in the area are extremely high. Yet the share of these resources that Baluch workers receive only affords them poverty and a slow death. They typically rent homes in groups and live in dire conditions, both in terms of hygiene and economic means. On their days off, these workers return to their home villages and often participate in the traditional local economy—most commonly, date harvesting.

The day laborers living in these villages are most often recruited through middlemen, who introduce them to employers and organize them into groups for various projects. Employers pay the middlemen, and the workers receive their wages only after the middlemen have taken their cut.

On the very day of the Bandar Abbas massacre, while stunned workers desperately sought the names or remains of their friends and colleagues, the village of Khun-e Sorkh was emptied. Instead of arranging temporary camps or sheltering the workers in the city, the mega-employers told them to leave and go back to their homes—without offering a single penny. While Bandar Abbas, wounded and grieving, was witnessing rare and illuminating scenes of solidarity, while women from working families were distributing food to rescuers and laborers, those who feast on the blood of the working class refused even one night of support for the workers paralyzed by shock and sorrow. Engineers and senior staff fled the city. Only the guards remained, tasked with protecting the machines—in the toxic, poisoned air left by the explosion.

Unskilled workers earn no more than twelve million tomans a month (around $150 US), and a single bus ticket costs nearly one million. Most Baluch workers travel from remote rural areas in multiple-stage routes and are forced to hire private cars for parts of the journey. On the day of the disaster, and the day after, these workers—hungry, grieving, and abandoned—were left totally alone, without a shred of compassion or solidarity. Two days later, the authorities staged their charade of “business as usual,” summoning those same crushed workers back to the job without paying them anything, just to prove that everything was “normal.” In this system, the life and death of a migrant, marginalized worker means nothing. It is a system in which employers and state officials seek only one thing: to perpetuate exploitation and erase the truth.

The Capitalist State and Precarious Life

What is called the center/periphery divide on the global scale persists within nation states as well. In Iran, the periphery/minority/margin takes the form of the Baloch, the Kurds, and the Arabs. This marginalization is the precondition for the existing order; it is what makes exploitation possible. The minoritized, within the global order, are represented as a problem, an obstacle, or even a threat. In this world, fuel-carrying [i.e., fuel smuggling as the job of many Baluchs] is no longer a subsistence economy—it is a crime; hauling drugs is no longer seen as cheap labor—it is a crime; and the Baloch is no longer a citizen—he is always a suspect.

The state is not just an observer of the labor market, but actively produces and preserves the conditions that render people precarious. It deregulates, it abstains from monitoring employment practices, it ensures “security” for employers by repressing workers whenever there is a strike or protest. The state considers its duty to be the provision of land, cheap energy, and precarious labor to capital. Minoritization and marginalization, already institutionalized within the Iranian nation state, are intensified in service of capital’s interests. In the Global South, states have fundamentally served as instruments for capitalist development. Informal and precarious labor is not a peripheral phenomenon; it is at the very heart of global capital accumulation. States play an active role in shaping and maintaining these labour and reproductive relations.

These diverse modes of production and reproduction intersect with relations of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, and religion. Precarious labor is not simply defined by the absence of a formal contract; it encompasses complex forms of producing and reproducing social relations. States serve capital by shaping labor law, creating free trade zones and special economic zones, and criminalizing labor organizing. They weaken labor protections and take the side of capital in labor disputes.

Even when the state claims to support labor, it merely pretends to defend workers’ rights while in practice facilitating informalization and intensifying precarity. With state approval, companies engineer labor forces in ways that reduce workers’ bargaining power. Even before this catastrophe, port labor was among the most dangerous forms of work in the country. Precarious, informal workers lack equipment and uniforms, and neither public nor private employers have ever prioritized their bodily safety. Now, even as the workers of Rajaee Port have seen their comrades slaughtered, they are not allowed to stop working—not even for a day. They cannot protest. They do not even know whether those two days when the port was shut down will be considered official leave or deducted from their wages.

Capitalist social relations don’t just produce exploitation. They also divide and stratify the working class: man/woman, rural/urban, agricultural/industrial, formal/informal, permanent/precarious. In today’s rentier-military capitalism in Iran, the intertwining of ethnic marginalization, gendered subordination, class oppression, and precarity has forced workers into varying degrees of subjugation and exploitation. The precarious workers of Bandar Abbas sit at the lowest rungs of the economic hierarchy, often pushed to the margins of geography and language. Those who are simultaneously subordinated in all three categories—class, ethnicity, and gender—stand at the epicenter of capital’s violence.

In the margins, precarity is not just unstable work. Workers are annihilated before our very eyes: they are hanged in public or burned alive on smuggling paths. What remains unseen are the precarious lives snuffed out at the intersection of insecure labor, national oppression, and gendered and class-based injustice. Until the relation between state, capital, and labor is understood as a terrain of struggle for life itself, until securing the right to live for all those pushed to the margins becomes central to protest movements, we will remain mere mourners of depoliticized, vanished bodies. That is why one of the root questions of this year’s International Workers’ Day, especially in the wake of this catastrophe, is solidarity between different struggles for social justice. The most vital battle is to free the possibilities of life, to defend the rights and the power of workers. The movement toward social solidarity and autonomous organization among workers, women, and oppressed nations is not just a slogan; it is a vision for the future.

The torch that lights the path of the struggle for labor’s rights is the defense of the very lives of those who have been marginalized, minoritized, and dispossessed.