NED's Links with Iran's Labour Movement

Remember Mansour Osanloo and the bus driver association's strike in Iran last year which was heavily publicised by all Anglophone and Anglophone-funded media? Now the following paragraph from this great article on National Endowment for Democracy's funded projects on Iran, researched by the Australian Michal Barker, suggests that the NED has indeed been working on Iranian labor groups for a while:

In 2005, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS also known as the Solidarity Center) obtained $185,000 from the NED to “support the emergence of a sustainable independent labor movement” in Iran. To understand the type of labor groups usually drawn into cooperating with the Solidarity Center, it useful to examine recent NED-related activities in Venezuela. Here we find that the NED provided aid to the organisations involved in the (temporary) ousting of democratically elected Hugo Chavez in 2002. They also provided the Solidarity Center with nearly US$600,000 between 1997 and 2001, significant due to the close links to the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (the group involved in the strike actions against Chávez in 2003). [36]

With regard to the Solidarity Center’s recent work in Iran, the NED notes that the money they received in 2005 would be used to “conduct an international workshop for Iranian labor leaders to acquire skills and benefit from the experiences of other trade unionists.” To protect the attendee’s identities, such meetings are carried out in secret. However, it is likely that such workshops are used to put Iranian labor activists in contact with other NED activists, like for example those involved in opposing Chavez in Venezuela.