Bread, Job, Freedom: Financialization, Labor Regimes and Resistance in Iran
Author: Ida Nikou, ida.h.nikou@gmail.com
Department: Sociology
University: SUNY Stony Brook , United States
Supervisor: Kathleen M. Fallon
Year of completion: 2025
Language of dissertation: English
Keywords:
Labor Market
, Financialization
, Resistance Movements
, Iran
Areas of Research:
Labor Movements
, labour market
, Economy and Society
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how financialized capitalism, under conditions of authoritarian rule and international sanctions, restructures labor regimes and shapes worker resistance in Iran. Drawing on labor regime theory and spatial political economy, it asks: how does the Iranian state mediate class relations and labor restructuring when global capital access is blocked? Through a comparative analysis of four cases—Iran National Steel Industrial Group (INSIG), Haft-Tappeh Sugarcane Company (HTSC), Heavy Equipment Production Company (HEPCO), and Chadormalu Mining Industrial Company (CMIC)—the dissertation shows how subordinate financialization has driven premature deindustrialization, expanded extractive dependencies, and reshaped labor markets through informalization, outsourcing, and systemic inflation. The study introduces the concept of the internal spatial fix, a reworking of David Harvey’s spatial fix, to explain how states under sanctions redirect financial flows inward—toward speculative sectors and elite-dominated extraction—deepening regional inequality and labor disempowerment. Methodologically, the dissertation employs a qualitative comparative case study approach, using a decade of archival data, protest event analysis, and spatial analysis of industrial restructuring. It identifies three central dynamics: (1) the convergence of sanctions and subordinate financialization in dismantling Iran’s productive base; (2) the breakdown of mass integrative apparatuses (MIAs) and the rise of coercive labor governance; and (3) the differentiated forms of worker resistance shaped by political memory, regional context, and relational capacity. This study contributes to scholarship on labor regimes, financialization, and authoritarianism by theorizing financialization under constraint and showing how historical legacies and spatial inequalities mediate labor agency. It offers a new framework for analyzing labor regimes in sanctioned states and a lens through which to understand the evolving terrain of struggle under global capitalism’s increasingly exclusionary and authoritarian forms.
