TEHRAN — Saeed, a 26-year-old elementary school teacher with a master's degree in Persian literature, spends his evenings scrolling job listings he describes as worse than his current post. "You take one look at the condition of job postings you can find online or in person, and you will understand why some young people feel like it's not even worth it going out for work," he told Al Jazeera. "But the expenses don't go away."
The Statistical Center of Iran, in its latest report released at the end of July, put year-on-year inflation at approximately 88 percent. Food prices are rising faster still, compressing the budgets of millions of households across a country of more than 92 million people.
Teachers, cashiers and salespeople earn less than 200 million rials a month—roughly $107 at the current exchange rate. Some jobs pay below the government's own basic monthly minimum wage of 166 million rials, or about $88. Saeed said employers compound the problem by refusing to offer insurance, demanding shifts of 12 hours a day and sometimes six days a week, and finding reasons to dock wages when workers have few alternatives.
The government approved a 60-percent increase in the basic minimum wage at the close of the previous Iranian calendar year in March. Even with that raise, the cost of a subsistence package for an average 3.3-person worker household was estimated at 430 million rials—equivalent to $230—at the time the increase took effect, as the economic fallout from the war was already spreading.
The gap between wages and basic costs shows up in individual purchases. A worker earning minimum wage and receiving government support spends roughly 10 percent of an entire month's pay on one kilogram of lamb. Ten kilograms of Iranian rice—a staple—absorbs more than one-fifth of monthly earnings. Housing, utilities, transportation and healthcare costs add further pressure.
Iran's economy entered the current crisis carrying decades of structural damage. Long-running U.S. and United Nations sanctions have restricted trade, limited foreign investment and cut off access to global financial systems for years. Corruption and mismanagement compounded those constraints. The war with the United States and Israel, now more than five months old, added a naval blockade of Iranian ports—cutting off a country that, despite its oil wealth, had already leaned heavily on self-sufficiency as a survival strategy against economic embargoes.
Two government-imposed internet shutdowns deepened the disruption. One occurred in January during nationwide protests in which thousands of people were killed. The shutdowns interrupted commerce, communication and the informal economic activity that many low-income Iranians depend on. Those events, layered onto the sanctions architecture and the physical blockade, produced the conditions Saeed describes in Tehran's job market.
Despite the severity of the strain, the economy has not collapsed. Iran is resource-rich and spent decades building supply chains and productive capacity oriented toward domestic needs precisely because external trade was so often restricted. That diversification, unusual for a major oil-exporting country, has given the economy a degree of resilience that a more trade-dependent nation would not have.
The 60-percent minimum wage increase the government approved in March carried its own risks. Iranian authorities acknowledged that pushing wages sharply higher without a corresponding rise in productivity threatens to accelerate money printing and worsen the inflation already eroding purchasing power. The government faced a choice between wages that workers could not live on and a monetary expansion that would make the wages worth less over time.
"A lot of employers don't offer insurance and are asking for 12 hours of work per day, sometimes six days a week," Saeed said. "They also come up with all sorts of excuses to deduct pay whenever they can, knowing you have limited options."
Saeed said Iranians with advanced degrees are now hunting for any available work regardless of their field of training. His master's degree in Persian literature, in a job market collapsing under the combined weight of war, sanctions and inflation, provides no advantage. He described people around him treating any paying job as the goal, with professional relevance a secondary concern. "Putting food on the table is exceedingly more difficult," he said.
