Persian phrase for nationwide strike. Used by Iranian unions, bazaar associations, teachers' councils, oil and petrochemical workers, and protest movements to escalate from marching to economic disruption.
The phrase calls for coordinated work stoppages across sectors and provinces. Its historical reference point is the 1978 bazaar strike that helped collapse the Pahlavi state, which is exactly why current regime media treats every strike call as illegitimate by default.
Etesab-keshvari is the word that scares the regime more than any chant. Marching ends at sundown. A strike ends when the strikers say it ends.
Learners following Iranian labor news need this word to read truck drivers, bazaaris, oil workers, and teachers as one connected story rather than scattered incidents.
اعتصاب کشوری (etesab-keshvari) is the standard Persian phrase for a nationwide strike. اعتصاب (etesab) is strike in the labor sense and کشوری (keshvari) means country-wide. The phrase is the organizing target for Iranian truckers, bazaaris, teachers, oil and petrochemical workers, nurses, and pensioners whenever a sector decides marching is not enough. Bazaar strikes carry the historical weight, the bazaar struck against the Shah in 1978 and brought the economy to a halt. Modern callers of etesab-keshvari point at that memory on purpose, the word is heavy because the precedent is heavy. Regime media works very hard to argue that any given strike call is partial, foreign-organized, or imaginary.
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