A worker cooling himself down in hot weather
More than 500 workers of different oil and gas projects in southern Iran have been hospitalized with a number of them dead due to high temperatures in recent days.
An oil sector wokers' union announced on Saturday that at least two people have died this week in the city of Abadan due to heatstroke and weakness caused by hours of exhausting work in extreme heat.
Two weeks ago another worker died during work in the provincial capital of oil-rich Khuzestan while the government offices and businesses were closed due to high temparatures.
Despite temperatures rising to more than 50 degrees Celsius – about 122 in Fahrenheit scale – in the southern parts of the country, where most of the oil and gas plants are located, subcontractors for the government refuse to stop work even for a few hours.
According to reports, the working conditions in the port city of Asaluyeh in Bushehr province is so bad that at least 100 workers are taken to hospitals for heatstroke daily, as the temperature has reached 53 degrees and the humidity is over 90 percent.
Amid a dire economic situation in Iran at least 10 workers have committed suicide in the last three months due to dismissal from their jobs and "livelihood problems". The latest happened on Saturday in the western city of Ilam.
With food prices rising faster after four years of United States’ ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions, Iranian workers and retirees have been holding regular protests or strikes to demand higher salaries.
In May, widespread protests by workers, shop owners, and teachers against poverty, inflation, and low wages, were met with heavy-handed crackdown and numerous arrests by security forces.