Using such primary sources as publications of the Railway Organization (bongah-e rah ahan), memoirs, songs, and Iranian archival documents, this study examines the formation of the Iranian railway workforce. In particular, this study focuses on the socialization process of railway workers during and immediately after the Allied occupation (1941-45), which greatly impacted the workers of the nascent railway industry due to the Allies’ control of transportation routes. By looking at the socialization process of workers of the largest state-owned industry at the time, it explores the intersection between the issue of labor and broader sociocultural transformations of Pahlavi Iran. Questions that this study addresses include: how the Railway Organization tried to discipline railway workers of various regional, ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds; how workers responded to various attempts at disciplining them and formed understandings of self; whether this process is typical when compared to workers in other industries within Iran and railway workers in other geographic contexts.
The significance of this paper lies partially in the empirical value of investigating labor history outside the oil industry, which hitherto has received almost exclusive attention from historians of Iran. More importantly, in line with the new labor historiography in other national contexts, this paper pays attention to the agency of workers by considering the discursive construction of the “working class” through analyzing workers’ daily life and social settings. Furthermore, rather than focusing exclusively on moments of confrontation such as protests and strikes, it examines the daily engagement of workers with their employer’s attempts to mold them into productive, loyal railway workers.
As this study demonstrates, railway workers formulated their own historical narrative and their place in it in response to the Railway Organization’s increasing attempt at strengthening control of all aspects of its workforce in the post-occupation period. In other words, railway workers shaped their understandings of self concomitantly with, and sometimes in competition with, the Railway Organization’s measures to mold workers into loyal employees. Nevertheless, workers’ understandings of self that developed in the period were not monolithic. They highlighted such divisions as different regional and national backgrounds among workers. Therefore, on the eve of the oil nationalization movement, railway workers included competing groups of workers whose interests conflicted with the Railway Organization as well as amongst themselves.
