Anti-Unionism: It’s A Fundamentalist, Authoritarian Kind of Thing.

Kidnapped off the streets of Tehran a few weeks ago by thuggish secret police, Mansour Osanloo, the president of Iran’s independent transport workers union, is lingering in an Iranian prison on unspecified charges. According to Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, “Mr Osanloo’s imprisonment comes as part of a clampdown on dissidents by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ultra-conservative government, in which scores of pro-democracy activists and -academics have been arrested over the past five months.”

The Transport Workers Union only seeks to improve the wages and working conditions of Iran’s bus workers, but this still brings them into conflict with a regime that believes that the example of Solidarity proves that independent unions will bring down an authoritarian government. Regime hardliners were also quite disturbed by a 2005 strike protesting a new rule to segregate women on the back of buses.

“Some religious hardliners are theologically opposed to the concept of a union,” the Telegraph reports, “arguing that the separation of bosses and workers is a divisive Western approach which Islam should discourage.”

Given the frequency with which an almost identical hostility to unions is expressed at a few ultra-conservative places in the educational blogosphere such as here, here, here and here, this leads to an interesting story line for a film — the Manchurian Islamic Fundamentalist.

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