From Covert Unemployment to Overt Unemployment: The Effect of Land Reform in Acknowledging Unemployment

In contrast with the official statistics, Iran did not experience full and perfect employment prior to the land reform. The conventional style of land exploitation and the population growth as a result of hygienic and nutritious facilities led to the inadequacy of productive resources for rural population and the growth of implicit and hidden unemployment in rural areas. That was why the excess of the rural population streamed to cities by the end of the agricultural year. In the 1320s and 1330s, upon the decrease in government constructive and civil programs, the urban employment capacity decreased and the urban unemployment became vivid and explicit. It was in 1330 that job market could no more employ the rural migrant workforce and a part of urban workforce. However, the government did not admit the existence of unemployment as a social issue with economic roots since it did not distinguish the rural migrants from urban unemployed workforce and claimed that there were sufficient opportunities for employment in rural regions. The present research examines the conversion of covert unemployment to overt unemployment and the role of land reforms in the admittance and acknowledgement of unemployment as a social problem by adopting social historians’ approach and their emphasis on the tension between the objective reality of unemployment and its ideological dimension. The results revealed that due to the limitation of re-distributing lands in land reforms, migrants’ return and their request for lands could possibly disturb the government’s intended method of re-distributing lands.