Two years into their long-running dispute, workers of Haft-Tappeh Sugarcane complex in Iran’s Khuzestan Province staged a rally on Tuesday at the sugar mill to protest at the detention of four colleagues arrested by security forces three days earlier.

In a statement published on their Telegram channel on Monday, the workers said their jailed colleagues had gone on hunger strike. The statement claimed the authorities had cited “missing files” and “absence of officials” as delaying legal procedures to free them.

The Haft-Tappeh workers have been on strike and protesting since June. But it results from the company owners’ failure to honor promises they made after an earlier round of workers’ protests in the fall of 2018.

The workers’ long-standing demands include payment of back wages, rehiring those laid off, and the arrest of Omid Asadbeigi, the company’s part-owner and chief executive officer, who is under investigation in several corruption and money-laundering cases but free on bail. They also want the company’s privatization reversed.

The Haft-Tappeh Sugarcane Agro-Industrial Complex Labor Syndicate is one of the oldest trade unions in the country, dating to 1974. The agro-industrial complex is the largest of its kind in Iran with more than 5,000 employees.

The previously state-owned company was sold to its current owners – Asadbeigi and Mehrdad Rostami – in 2016 by the Iranian Privatization Organization (IPO), a government body, for 60 billion rials, equivalent at the time to around $2 million.

According to IPO officials, the company had an accumulated debt of 3,450 billion rials (around $115 million) at the time of the sale. This included hefty sums owed to the Social Security Organization for sums deducted from workers’ wages but not passed to the state as social security contributions, a failure that led to a lapse in the workers’ health insurance.

A parliamentary investigation in September 2020 led to an Audit Court verdict annulling the sale of the company due to irregularities in the privatization procedures and the failure of the new owners to honor their commitments. But the verdict is yet to be carried out.

The whole affair has since 2018 proved far more than a simple labor dispute. One of the workers leaders Esmail Bakhshi was in 2018 held without trial as a threat to ‘national security.’ He subsequently challenged the minister of intelligence Mahmoud Alavi to a live television debate on torture in Iran’s prisons.

In January 2019, Amnesty International reported that Bakhshi and a colleague faced the risk of torture in jail, while Bakhshi claimed that a televised confession he had made to membership of an émigré socialist group resulted from threats and intimidation. In May this year, Bakhshi was pardoned along with other prisoners on the occasion of the Eid al-Fitr by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.