A wealthy Iranian businessman sits in a Dubai hotel and says, “Business is drying up, industry is collapsing. There’s zero investment. I know. I see it with my own eyes.”
Mehrdad Emadi, an Iranian-born economic adviser to the European Union, who is based in the UK, says, “We’re close to seeing mass unemployment in cities and queues for social handouts. There are few alternatives for those people and many will end up on the bread line.”
A series of conversations conducted by Reuters with Iranians by telephone reveal how widespread unemployment is becoming. The government suppresses talk of job losses, but those have lost their jobs talk.
Mona, 31, lost her job in the human resources department of a large private contractor in the oil, gas and construction industries six months ago and has struggled to find work since.
The company started to trim its workforce of 6,000 three years ago, but conditions sharply deteriorated last year and many staff didn’t receive their wages for months.
Mona says she lost her job after she and some of her colleagues wrote a letter to their managers protesting about their withheld wages.
“I have no hope for the future. When you lose hope, you stop caring,” she said.
Ali, a 42-year-old mechanical engineer, suffered a similar fate three months ago when he was laid off by a small industrial equipment maker after sanctions made it increasingly difficult for the company to import crucial materials from Europe.
“What could we do? We couldn’t get this stuff from China, the quality just isn’t good enough,” he said by telephone.
The company now employs 400 people, down from more than 1,000 two years ago, and Ali worries it will soon have to close down, like many others.
“So many industrial projects in Iran are grinding to a halt,” he said. “No companies are investing. They think there may be war and everything will be lost.”
The International Monetary Fund, in April, said the Iranian economy grew 2 percent last year and predicted it would grow 0.4 percent this year—but it may well be doing a lot worse.
The Iranian Statistical Center put the unemployment rate at 12.9 percent for the first three months of the Iranian year that began in March, more than a percentage point lower than in the previous three months.
Analysts find the statistic impossible to believe.
“The figures aren’t even close,” said Emadi, who believes the unemployment figure is really above 20 percent.
Iran-based economists and members of parliament critical of the government, estimate that 500,000 to 800,000 Iranians have lost their jobs in the past year.
Emadi cites the car industry, the biggest manufacturing sector, as the main cause of the sharp decline in employment, after Iranian media reported a 30 percent drop in car and component production in the past six months.
The slump is not just confined to the industrial sector. Nasrin lost her job as a university lecturer 18 months ago and has struggled to find a teaching or research post since. She makes ends meet by getting temporary research jobs, and says she is fortunate because she owns her own apartment.
“If I was not supported by my family, I would be in a miserable state now,” she said in an email to Reuters. “It’s so humiliating for me to turn to some places for work, but I’ve had to.”
Like many frustrated Iranian professionals, she is now intent on leaving the country if she can, a trend that has led to a brain drain in recent years as those that have the money and contacts have gone abroad.
