Document Type : Original Article
Highlights
An Intersectional Analysis of Women Carpet Weavers' Labor Rights: A Case Study of Women Carpet Weavers in Tabriz
Iran is a country known for its handmade carpets. Economically, carpets constitute Iran's most important non-oil exports amounting up to 2019 of the GDP. There are many carpet weaving companies in Iran that depend on the labor of carpet weavers; however, weaving carpets is still classified as housework, and most Iranian carpets are produced at home. In addition, carpet weaving is known as a female work because of its home-made nature, and it is usually done by rural working-class women and urban areas women that live in impoverished neighborhoods and have limited education. Many women initially do carpet weaving for home use and as part of housework, but gradually, they scale up production and are able to sell and profit from it, to contribute to the family income. There are about 1.2 million full-time carpet weavers in Iran, more than 75 percent of whom are women. Studies illustrate the difficulties of carpet weaving as a profession, referring to documented health concerns, ergonomically poor practices and the lack of a proper work environment adjusted to the work demands embedded in the profession.
The “Persian”-style carpet is a sign of art and beauty around the world, but for a woman weaver, it may just be a sign of pain and suffering. This pain and suffering is rooted in the exploitation of these women, in receiving little or no compensation for their work. For the exploration of their marginalized position, intersectionality could be a useful analytical tool to focus on gender, ethnic, class, and legal issues that carpet women weavers have faced due to their complex positionality/social location. So, this article critically analyzes anti-discrimination law in Iran by examining its labor laws, focusing specifically on discrimination in employment for women carpet weavers in the country, through an intersectional approach. It brings attention to the complications of not only gender, but also class, location, and the age of women in the carpet industry in Iran. The main research question concerns the value of intersectionality as an analytical tool to understand the shortcomings of current legal practices in Iran, and consequently, how to make them more equitable, particularly for marginalized populations. After reviewing specific labor laws concerning gender equality in Iran, we conducted interviews with twelve carpet waver women in Tabriz to shed light on their experience of legal deprivation, through the intersections of gender, law, location, age, and class. These case studies indicate the complexity and the relativity of the different privileged and disadvantaged positions within the target population and even inside a single specific group embedded therein, in relation to the legal system put in place to redress their marginalized positioning. Further, the study shows that the group that was subject to the reformist act with labor law to centralize their margin position still faces challenges to negotiate their rights because of the lack of women's labor rights discourse as part of the analytical lens of intersectionality as well as the complexity of women's experiences in interpreting to legal system.
In 2009, the Iranian legislature passed a law allowing female carpet weavers to have insurance and social security benefits. Despite the enactment of this law, there are multiple barriers to enforce it. Now, more than ten years later, only 300,000 people (most of them men) have been able to access insurance. What made the Iranian legal system unable to protect this group of women and demarginalize them? To answer this question, we shed light on power relations in the interpersonal, disciplinary, cultural, and structural matrix of domination that illustrate how they are both included and excluded from the accessibility of different social, economic, and cultural capitals.
The issues faced by women carpet weavers analyzed through an intersectional lens helps us to understand how subjective experiences are located within larger structural inequalities and the ways in which an intersectional framework can address these inequalities. Our case studies indicate the complexity and difference among experiences of women even inside of one specific group against the legal system which is trying to redress their disadvantage and marginalized positioning. More specifically, while there are some (limited) labor laws put in place for legal protection targeting the carpet weaving industry and female professionals therein, the fact that the bureaucratic system itself remains unchanged hinders Iranian women carpet weavers from accessing their regulated rights, Advocacy for this group of marginalized female professionals in terms of access to insurance would require adopting an intersectional approach to meaningfully address institutional discrimination and unequal structures that define their legal and invisible discrimination. A weak rule of law jeopardizes justice-oriented acts, and because the legal framework within the country is not responsive to the demands of local social movements, the applications or practices of such law do not necessarily translate into positive outcomes for its proclaimed beneficiaries. The non-implementation of the female carpet weavers' insurance law is not taken seriously, which, at a very basic level, indicates the distance between the state and its residents, between men and women, and also between different groups in Iranian society, considering the lack of solidarity promoted to support marginalized female professionals in the carpet weaving industry. Partial reform by the legal system in a structure that upholds unequal power relations cannot achieve the desired results without placing intersectionality in the center of the labor law framework.
So, analyzing the resistance of social inequalities against reformist acts of the legal system in such societies is only possible if engaging questions of women's rights to be a part of the analytical lens of intersectionality. The first important step is recognizing this group of women as homeworkers by labor law and including homeworkers under the labor act due to benefit the standards of fair labor and its advantages. On the other side, designing a multi-layer, flexible and complex insurance system which provides just access to insurance for all weavers regarding to their intersectional positioning at the intersection of gender, class, location and age is necessary.
