Alireza Raeisi, deputy for health at the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Health, Treatment, and Medical Education, announced a figure that starkly contrasts with previously released statistics, stating that 10,000 workers die annually in Iran due to workplace accidents.
This comes while the Iranian regime’s Legal Medicine Organization had previously reported that approximately 2,000 workers died on duty in 2024, and in prior years, reports from the Ministry of Labor, the regime’s Majlis (parliament) research center, and the Legal Medicine Organization consistently put the annual death toll below 2,000.
However, according to the regime’s official IRNA news agency, Raeisi has now stated that “every year, around 10,000 people in Iran die due to work-related incidents,” emphasizing the need to revise environmental and occupational health standards to protect workers’ well-being.
These figures reveal that Iran’s annual average of worker fatalities—caused by a lack of safety and proper standards—is more than triple the total number of workers who died across the entire European Union. According to global statistics, in 2024, a total of 3,286 workers died due to workplace accidents across all 27 EU member states; for instance, the number in the United Kingdom was 138.
The Iranian regime’s deputy health minister added: “This level of mortality is not low, and measures must be taken to reduce preventable deaths. Many disabilities also result from workplace incidents, with the effects of some becoming evident only in the long term. For example, workers exposed to coal vapors or benzene fumes at gas stations may not develop problems immediately, but the consequences of their work exposure appear after several years.”
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The state-run ILNA news agency called this “drastic discrepancy from previous official statistics” “strange.” It noted, however, that although data from the Legal Medicine Organization has so far been more accurate than that of the Ministry of Labor and the Social Security Organization regarding worker fatalities, “according to many labor activists, even the figures released by the Legal Medicine Organization cannot reflect the true scale of workplace accidents, as the practice of concealing real statistics—common in other areas—also plagues the reporting of labor incident data.”
The deputy health minister’s remarks imply that over 800 workers die each month in Iran due to occupational accidents—equating to around 26 to 27 workers dying every single day.
Farshad Esmaeili, a labor law expert and researcher in Iran, told ILNA: “For years, the Ministry of Labor has released statistics that only include official workshops and insured workers. Employers and contractors avoiding responsibility, workers being afraid to report workplace accidents, and employers settling with the families of deceased workers—all contribute to making the official figures on workplace incidents unreliable. The Ministry of Labor is aware of this issue and knows that the statistics it provides only cover a portion of deceased workers—those who had insurance.”
According to him, another reason for the significant gap between the real number of worker deaths and the official figures reported by government institutions is that in many death cases, the cause listed on the death certificate is—either mistakenly or deliberately—something else. For example, instead of stating “work-related accident,” the certificate may read “blunt force trauma to the head” so that the case does not appear on the official list of workplace fatalities.
The recent comments by the deputy health minister point to a deep crisis in worker safety in Iran and confirm how various officials in the Iranian regime have, for decades, engaged in falsifying statistics or deliberately concealing real figures to cover up their failings in areas such as workplace accidents, inflation, economic growth, unemployment, and poverty.
In Iran, the issue of worker safety and health has become a serious challenge due to government neglect, weak oversight, and the failure to prioritize workers’ lives. The lack of basic safety standards, especially in high-risk work environments, leads to accidents that directly endanger the lives and health of workers.
