Afghan Women workers in Iran endure long hours, low wages, and constant threats
Freshta was preparing for the university entrance exam when the Taliban barred females from universities. So she and her four-member family illegally migrated to Iran a year ago.
They settled in southern Tehran where the 18-year-old began working in a fabric shop in southern Tehran, while her brother worked in a tailoring workshop in Qom. Given the Iranians are increasing deportations of undocumented migrants, her brother came home once a week and used taxis to reduce chances of encountering the police. His precautions weren’t enough: “On Friday afternoon, June 7 this year, my brother was heading home in a taxi when Iranian police asked him for identification. Since he didn’t have any, they arrested him and took him to a detention camp,” Freshta tells Zan Times.
After hearing of their son’s arrest, their parents went to the camp but couldn’t secure his release. “My mother showed my brother’s Afghan ID card and said, ‘My son is only 14 years old and a mere child; what will he do alone on the other side of the border if you deport him?’” Freshta recounts. “But no one listened to her. They just said, ‘If he does not have legal status he will be deported.’ The next day, they deported my brother.”
Now, the burden of financially supporting their family falls even more heavily on Freshta. “Before he was deported, my brother earned 7 million tomans a month (US$165). Since he was a child, he couldn’t work much, but even though his salary was low, it was a huge help,” she explains. “With my 8 million toman (US$190) salary, we could manage food and rent expenses. But now I don’t know how to cover the family’s expenses.”
As a young unskilled Afghan woman, Freshta has limited options when it comes to finding work in the Iranian job market. She works 10 hours a day for a very low wage in a fabric shop: “They pay me almost half of what they pay an Iranian worker. I don’t get any of the other rights like insurance, child benefits, or severance pay. I do everything from carrying heavy fabric rolls to dealing with customers and selling the fabric. Some nights, my arms ache from lifting the heavy rolls, and the pain lasts until morning.”
Zobeida is another Afghan migrant in Iran who is underpaid for her work. The 21-year-old woman works as a saleswoman in a clothing shop in Mashhad. She migrated to Iran from Ghor province when she was 8 years old. As the eldest child in a six-member family, Zobeida has to help her aging father provide for their family. Like Freshta, she works non-stop every day, with only an hour off for lunch. From 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., she deals with customers, carries heavy packages of clothes, and cleans the shop. Despite this heavy workload, She makes only seven million tomans (US$165) a month, the equivalent of what a minimum-wage Iranian worker earns in fewer than four days of work.Zobeida was able to study up to the 12th grade with temporary residency documents but then was not allowed to continue her education. Her 50-year-old father works in a plastic waste warehouse but cannot do heavy labour due to severe back pain. So Zobeida has worked hard for the last four years to help cover her family’s living expenses.
Like thousands of other Afghan refugees, Zobeida’s life has been impacted by the rise of anti-refugee sentiment in Iran and the Iranian government’s restrictions on employment and residency for undocumented refugees. In addition to being denied education and enduring harsh labour for little pay, Zobeida now has to make sure she stays out of sight of Iranian police forces.
The shop where she has worked for the past two years is in a market near the Imam Reza Shrine, a holy site for Shia Muslims in Mashhad. In January 2023, the Iranian authorities decreed that no foreigners were allowed to work within a three-kilometer radius of the shrine. “Since last year, there have been more restrictions on the presence of foreign nationals around the shrine, but this year, the crackdown on Afghans have intensified. It’s gotten to the point where the police or labour inspectors patrol the markets, and if they find an Afghan, they arrest and fine them,” Zobeia says. The added stress of worrying about being caught and deported has caused her to develop nervous problems.
Iran’s Ministry of Labour has warned shop owners and industrial companies that if they are found to be employing foreign workers without proper permits, they will be fined 1.2 million tomans (US$28) per day per worker. As Zobeida had neither residency or work permits, she made an arrangement with her employer that she would leave the shop whenever labour inspectors arrived. And she would pay the fine to her employer if caught on the premises. “Last week, around 11 a.m., one of my coworkers called me from the entrance of the market to inform me that the inspectors were near. I had a customer at the time, an elderly lady. I told her that I would pretend to be her daughter if the inspectors came into the shop. She agreed, and, with her cooperation, the inspectors didn’t notice that I was the saleswoman,” says Zobeida. “Sometimes I have to leave the market for an hour or more until the inspectors leave.”
Although Zobeida describes the terms imposed by her employer as “exploitation,” she feels forced to accept them: “If I stop working, my father alone won’t be able to cover the household expenses, rent, and my siblings’ school fees. We might have to pull my siblings out of school. I don’t want them to remain uneducated, so aside from a small amount for my travel costs, I give my entire salary to my father at the end of every month.”
Sometimes those harsh working conditions aren’t financial exploitation. Samana is a 17-year-old who lives with her family in the city of Qom. Due to her family’s financial problems, she left school four years ago when she was in the seventh grade. Samana was recently fired from her sales job for refusing her employer’s sexual advances. She could have filed a complaint against her employer if she had official residency documents, but, even though she was born in Iran, she and her family are powerless and don’t dare talk to the police.
For working 10 hours a day, Samana earned 6 million tomans (US$145) per month. She had worked as a saleswoman in various shops but due the increased exploitation of young refugee women by Iranian employers, as well as the rise of anti-refugee sentiment, her family does not allow her to continue that work. At the same time, they need her income – Samana’s father works in construction and earns up to 17 million tomans (US$405) per month, which is not enough to cover the expenses of a five-member family in Iran.
To aid her family, Samana became the caregiver for the elderly mother of their landlord, which means their rent is reduced according to how much she works each month. Finding somewhere to live in Iran is also becoming difficult for Afghan migrants.
Banners have been put up in parts of Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Fars, and other major cities, which proclaim that Afghan refugees have until the end of September (or October in some areas) to leave their homes and return to Afghanistan. These banners urge Iranian citizens not to rent their homes, shops, motorcycles, or other properties to Afghan migrants and to refrain from employing them.
Afghan women are stuck – they won’t be able to find any work in Afghanistan due to the harsh restrictions of the Taliban and so have to search for work in the increasingly harsh and low-paying conditions in Iran. This is how Tahira Naseri, a women’s rights activist, explains the difficulties of young Afghan women workers in Iran: “Perhaps the only reason is that we don’t have a responsible government in Afghanistan. On the contrary, the Taliban’s crimes and violence have made women more vulnerable. We see women and girls, with or without their families, seeking refuge in neighboring countries, both legally and illegally.”
*Shakiba Rahyab is a pseudonym for an Afghan journalist in Iran. The names in this article have been changed to protect their security.
