Features ‘They Had Dreams’: The Invisible Workers at Iran’s Port

Iranwire – They sneak in at dawn and vanish by night. They carry heavy loads with their bare hands.

They have no contracts, no insurance, and no protective gear – and when disaster strikes, not even the dignity of being counted among the dead.

When a massive explosion tore through Shahid Rajaee Port in Bandar Abbas, the “zir-fansi-ha” or “under-the-fence” workers were engulfed in flames and smoke.

Now, two weeks later, their families wait in agonizing limbo, searching for loved ones who officially never existed.

At the bottom of Iran’s labor hierarchy, these workers were unregistered, undocumented, and ultimately invisible.

One survivor of the explosion, who suffered a fractured skull when the blast hurled a heavy object at his head, spoke to IranWire from his hospital bed.

“I’m from Pasak Qasr-e Qand village, but I’ve lived in Bandar Abbas since I was two,” he said. “There were about 200 companies at the port, each with at least 200 employees. All the workers were daily wage earners. Our company stored barrels of bitumen, and all its workers were on daily wages.”

“I’m one of those under-the-fence workers you’re talking about. It wasn’t like I worked permanently in one place.”

“One day, I was at one company, the next day at another. It’s not like any employer recognized me as a company worker.”

The young man had handled bitumen barrels with bare hands – no gloves, no safety equipment.

When workplace inspectors showed up, he and his colleagues would make themselves scarce. Speaking out about conditions meant losing access to all 200 companies operating at the port.

After five years under these conditions, he considered himself “lucky to stay alive.”

Before the explosion shattered his skull and his summer wedding plans, he had hoped to celebrate getting married.

“Many of my missing colleagues also had dreams like mine,” he said.

The routine was always the same. Workers gathered in city squares early in the morning. “Sometimes, there were ten of us. Sometimes a hundred,” the injured worker recalled. “A car would show up and shout ‘dock.’ We’d get in. We’d enter through the side and back gates.”

While he had an identification card, many of his coworkers did not. None of their names appeared in any official registry.

“I’m sure the families of the people I worked with don’t even know how to begin looking for their loved ones,” he said.

The absence of documentation has made the aftermath of the disaster especially cruel. Families of the missing have no way of confirming whether their loved ones were at the port during the explosion.

Without bodies or official employment records, they remain trapped in agonizing limbo – unable to grieve, claim benefits, or even prove their loved ones were there when disaster struck.

Kazem, a contract worker at Shahid Rajaee Port with a more formal employment status, told IranWire, “Where they’re from doesn’t matter, but most are Baluch.”

“Khun-Sorkh village is adjacent to the dock, and its residents are Sunni. Most don’t speak Persian and work at the port in sweltering heat and freezing cold for minimal wages.”

The workers’ precarious economic situation extends beyond the dock. 

“Under-the-fence workers often live together,” Kazem explained. “They’re seen in city squares. Some even sleep in parks, urban green spaces, and boulevards during most seasons. They can’t afford to rent in the city.”

Most are single men or have families they’ve left behind in distant villages.

“They live communally. They head out in the morning and return late at night, perhaps able to send money home at the end of the month,” Kazem added.

Eight days after the explosion, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, addressed the disaster with words that stung the families of the missing.

“Various incidents happen to institutions: earthquakes, fires, destruction – intentional or unintentional. All kinds happen.”

“But they get remedied. Here, too, if there’s been a problem for the institutions, inshallah [God willing], it will be remedied promptly by the power and capability of our healthy, capable, and young executive agencies.”

His statement made no mention of the workers who had died or remained missing. For the families of the under-the-fence workers, these words “poured salt on bleeding wounds.”

Their loved ones hadn’t been counted as citizens in life – now, they weren’t even acknowledged in death.

As the scale of the disaster became apparent, some officials began to recognize the plight of undocumented workers.

Esmail Hajizadeh, executive secretary of the Hormozgan Workers’ House, admitted, “It’s unclear how many daily-wage Baluch and Sistani workers have died.”

He confirmed what families already knew – that many workers lacked identification cards or didn’t have them on them at the time of the explosion.

“The identity of daily-wage workers isn’t registered, and they don’t have permanent employers,” Hajizadeh said.

“These workers handled loading and unloading. There’s no list. Some of the missing are among them.”

In the aftermath, a website called Yadar was launched to help people search for missing loved ones who had worked at the dock and register information about them.

However, a cultural activist from Bandar Abbas told IranWire that the effort “was only tolerated for a few days. They said it was shut down by order of the ‘authorities’.”

The activist wasn’t surprised. He said, “Why would a government built on lies act contrary to its history this time? I wasn’t surprised.”

Two weeks after the explosion, the human toll continued to mount.

According to civil society activists, over 350 workers remained hospitalized in Bandar Abbas’s Sahib Al-Zaman and Shahid Mohammadi hospitals, with more than 20 in critical condition.

“Severe burns, respiratory injuries from chemical smoke, multiple fractures, and trauma from being thrown by the explosion left many in critical condition,” one activist reported.

“This is what we know. There must be many more who were transferred to hospitals in other cities.”

The Rajaee Port disaster is part of a familiar pattern in Iran’s industrial sector. The Director General of Crisis Management in Hormozgan acknowledged that “the area had previously received warnings about safety, but sufficient measures were not taken.”