Workers at Razi Petrochemical Complex in the southern port city of Mahshahr stopped working and joined the strike campaign in other energy and steel plants.

Reports on social media say the workers went on strike on Sunday demanding a 79% wage increase for the current year.

The plant began operations in 1968 to produce Ammonia, Urea, Phosphoric Acid, Sulphuric Acid, etc. It is also the largest fertilizer producer in Iran.

In 2020, Ali Akbar Ahmadi Dashti, CEO of the company was arrested on charges of financial corruption and a 330,000 USD embezzlement.

Workers in more than 80 companies, including steel workers, across the country joined industrial action, protesting poor working conditions, low wages and rising costs of living, the Council for Organizing Oil Contract-Workers' Protests said April 25.

On Friday, a regime official said four thousand striking energy workers in the energy and petrochemical sectors are being replaced.

In recent years, as the Iranian National Oil Company has ceded many operations to quasi-private companies, most of the work is done by temporary contract workers with little pay and no benefits.

The so-called private companies are controlled by the military or other state entities, or by well-connected regime insiders who quash labor demands by using government security forces.

Labor activists warn that society is on the verge of explosion as strikes reach expand. Experts say there is no end in sight as tensions rise amidst a crumbling economy and the biggest anti-regime sentiment in years.