Saltfish and Strikes Part 1

For over a thousand years Icelanders have known that to split a fish, clean and then hang it up in the cold wind will preserve it for months. This dried or harðfisk allowed survival through brutal winters and long sea journeys. It even cleans your teeth as you strip the hard flesh from its skin. However fish that is salted before it’s dried lasts even longer, and when soaked in water to revive it becomes delicate and delicious. So by the 18^th century salting had become Iceland's most important method of fish preservation and until WW2 salted fish was over 60% of the export value of all its fish products.[1]



Salt cod drying Aberdeen c1910

When I last worked salt cod it was to remove the worms infesting the flesh of the ‘wings’ of the fish. Seals were usually blamed for the worms though the cod were more likely to have infected the seals.

I stood in a heated factory removing the worms with large tweezers from the almost ready fish. In the winter of 1915-6, the women first had to clean the cod in open troughs of water on the beach.

The temperature was down to minus 15 degrees centigrade and there was a thick layer of ice on the cod washing tubs in the morning. Hreiðarsína Hreiðarsðóttir got up at four to boil fish for lunch before going to work because she wasn’t happy leaving her daughter to manage the coke oven. A farmer she knew complained that he couldn’t get young women to work as they were paid so much in the fish. Hreiðarsína scoffed at the idea that she was well paid,

‘I’ve worked many fish that are so large that.. [when ready to work - the head removed, gutted and split the length of the body to open it out in one piece] the neck rests on the ground and the tail reaches to my armpit. Each fish has to be cleaned, the back scrubbed, then [scrubbed] under each wing, turn it over and remove any salt without tearing it, pull away the membrane from the chest, take out the bony parts round the neck, remove any blood from the fillets, get into the neck and take out any blood and if its not well done we’d get it back from the inspectors’.

For this heavy, filthy work the women got two aura [0.2 kr] for each fish.[2]

They drank coffee every hour so as not to freeze which they heated on the coke ovens in the saltfish drying shed and of course had to provide for themselves.

Stacking the cod

In 1912 Women fish workers in Hafnarfjörður struck for higher wages. Briét Bjarnhéðinsdóttir, editor of Kvennablaðið, covered the story by phone from Reykjavik. There were about 100 women working in the fish and all of them had stopped work and they had joined the same newly founded union with the men, Verkmannafélagið Hafnarfjarðar. The women reported that they were striking because all kinds of  fish work - spreading, stacking etc was paid at 15 aura per hour (0.15 kr), except ‘wetfish work’ at 18 aura ph. They were unhappiest with overtime and Sunday work - for each they got just 15 aura whilst men were being paid 40-50 aura for Sunday work and even more in Reykjavik. The women wanted; 18 aura for day work 23 aura for overtime from 7 - 11pm 28 aura per hour after 11 pm. 30 aura ph for Sunday work and 40 aura ph for Sunday work after 7 pm. Briét reported that the employers didn’t want to budge, ‘although most of them had thought the demands were fair’.

Briét likens this strike to the British miners’ who went out on strike in February 1912 demanding a minimum wage against a complicated sliding scales of wages that meant that they never quiet knew what they'd get paid. The women in Hafnarfjörður won most of what they wanted, though the article doesn’t go into detail it was a great victory.

Coming soon, Part 2 - Making salt fish while the sun shines

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[1] http://bit.ly/yqjuww  A Comprehensive Overview of the Icelandic Fish Industry, 5.1.3 University of Akureyri

[2] Verkakvennafélagið Framsókn 50 Ára 1914-1964 cited in Íslandsdætur pg 133

Women's Oppression, Empowerment and Breast Implants

There is a link between the breast implant scandal[1] involving at least 400 women in Iceland and hundreds of thousands of women across Europe, and the 'Just Fearless, Women Empowering Women' conference coming to Reykjavik next week.

They are both sold as solutions to what’s wrong in women's lives but are the wrong answers to real problems.

Twenty years ago women had breast implants as part of reconstructive surgery after cancer or a few had implants because they worked in the porn industries. Now thanks to the rise of ‘raunch culture’[2] millions of women round the world are sold breast implants as the solution to the dissatisfaction they feel with their bodies. But 'ideas do not fall from heaven and nothing comes to us in a dream',[3] we have been bombarded with advertising images of ideal female bodies that mean most of us are too thin or more often too fat and we don’t have the right sized breasts. So we are sold the solutions from diets, exercise regimes, padded bras and then implants. The companies selling the cure for the insecurities they have helped create, including cosmetic surgery companies, do it for the enormous profits.  So it was inevitable that a company would eventually cut corners to save money and increase their profits. That company turned out to be Poly Implant Prosthese (PIP), founded by Jean-Claude Mas. Since 2001 his company has been filling implants with industrial-grade silicon suitable for mattresses which cost 1/8^th of the price of medical grade silicon. This means that women with less money, working class women, got these implants rather than better quality ones.

The ‘Women Empowering Women’ Conference is selling the idea that we can fix our lives by starting a business. It says ‘this powerful summit dares women to tackle their personal and professional challenges, be FEARLESS, and plant their feet firmly on the path to success.’ In other words it’s made up of a bunch of motivational speakers, for whom this is a career in itself, plus local business women and the President of Kvenréttindafélag Ísland, the Icelandic Women's Rights Association, Helga Guðrún Jónasdóttir who used to be president of Landssamband Sjálfstæðiskvenna, the national Tory women’s network.

If they can get hundreds of women to pay 2.500 kr and more to pay 5000 kr to ‘meet and greet’ the speakers, then these conferences can be highly lucrative. This ‘empowerment’ is a poisonous idea that throws failure back on the individual as though we can all pull ourselves up if we really want to. It ignores class, access to capital/credit, personal disadvantages, financial crisis and cuts in social spending. It says if your business/life doesn’t work out as planned then it must be your fault - look how successful we all are.

The solution to the PIP scandal is relatively simple - the Government can pay for any women in Iceland who wants to have the implants removed and they can recoup the money from the surgeon who imported and fitted these implants.

The solution to capitalism feeding on and profiting from our insecurities can ultimately only be to get rid of capitalism. But right now we don’t have to stand for the relentless sexualised and sexist advertising nor the insidious ideas of right-wing women with something to sell.

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[1] http://bit.ly/AnLF7R

[2] Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the rise of raunch culture

[3] Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola 1966

To Talk about Women's Oppression We have to Talk about Class

In my last post I wrote about the ‘developments in equality’ in the Althing. Women’s equality in Iceland has made great progress since the end of the 19th century but it was fought for by ordinary women and men not handed down by the ruling class.

The source of women’s oppression is much older than capitalism. Its roots lie in the development of class society before the Sumerians invented writing to catalogue their surplus food and tradable goods. It was the rise of class society that created what Frederick Engels[1] called ‘the world historic defeat of the Female Sex’. By which he meant that as developments in agriculture meant more labour was needed so women took on much more responsibility for raising children than they had previously had to. Then women’s lives were further restricted as private property developed to be controlled and handed over to the next generation.[2]

5000 years later under capitalism, the current form of class society, all women experience oppression[3] but that experience is mediated by class. Millions of middle class women around the world can liberate themselves by buying the labour of other women to clean their houses and care for their children. That is not an option for the thousands of millions of working class women, who know that ‘the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.[4]

Kolaburða - carrying coal

The Icelandic magazine Fjallkonan, which strongly supported women’s rights,[5] argued in 1885 that married women in Reykjavik had a slightly easier time than working women as they would not usually need to take the worst jobs. These jobs were collectively called Stritavinna - hard work, they included eyrarvinna - dock work, water carrying and Laugaferðirnar, the innocuous sounding laundry journey.

Eyrarvinna, loading and unloading ships meant carrying cargo, often sacks of coal. The men lifted the sacks onto the women’s shoulders and head, who then carried the load to the warehouses. Horses were apparently too valuable for this work. The worst of it, Fjallkonan pointed out, ‘was that women were only paid a third or quarter of the men’s wage yet they do the same work and as much as the men.’ ‘Nowhere in this country are conditions so like slavery as for the women in Reykjavik who do dock work’.[6]

For the laundry trips, women carried back-breaking loads of washing, in all weathers out to the hot springs, a round trip of several kilometres with no road. If the weather wasn’t dry then the washing would have to be carried back wet. The women also had to carry a tub, bucket, soap and food. Children who were too young to be left at home had to walk there too. There were at least two fatal accidents[7] when women slipped and fell into the boiling water yet a safety frame wasn’t put over the springs until after the turn of the century.

 

Another article in Fjallkonan[8] remembered the deaths and noted that a few krona spent on cement and a metal frame would save lives. Rather optimistically Valdimar suggested this penny pinching was because the Washers were usually women, but the treatment of deckhands proved the authorities were equally content for men to die, to save money, as much as women.

Anna Þorsteinsdóttir, died on her way home from the Springs, when she slipped on ice into a brook and weighed down by the washing pack on her back, drowned. Anna’s horrible death has been commemorated by artist Harpa Björnsdóttir in her sculpture, Fist [9] It's a clenched fist made of soap and plaster, raised to Anna and the memory of all the women who had to wash clothes at Laugardalur.

In 1907 a water carriers wage was 2 aurar[10] per bucket whether a man or woman. Each trip to a well was made with 2 buckets and it took 75 trips per day to earn 3 kr, theoretically a working wage.[11] However it was also common to pay for water carrying in food, clothes and alcohol.

One particular water carrier was called Gunna Grallari because she knew the entire Psalm book Grallarann [12] and sang it constantly whilst carrying water for Hotel Ísland and the chemist NS Krüger as well as cleaning their toilets. Despite being hard work water carrying was usually a job for those unable to stand harder work, so the young, old or unhealthy.

Ásmundur Sveinsson commemorated the water carriers with his extraordinary modernist sculpture Vatnsberi, made in 1936 which last summer was finally moved to the corner of Bankastræti and Lækjargata where the artist intended it should be.

Vatnsberinn

It’s now close to the site of the well named Bernhöftsbrunninn, when Bankastræti was called Bakarastígur or Bakarabrekka, because of the Bernhöfts bakery built in 1834. Explaining the Town Council decision not to allow the statue to be placed centrally, Einar Magnússon commented that the authorities did not see why they had to take the piece seriously as it ‘didn’t represent anything seen by normal eyes’.[13] It’s an unintentionally illuminating comment from a class that wants work done but doesn’t want to see those who do it.

The progress working class women and men have made since has been by collective action, strikes and protests. In 1907 women in Hafnarfjörður working in fishmeal processing went on strike for higher wages and won after barely a day. This was probably the first strike by women in Iceland.[14]

But progress can be lost and if the financial crisis is paid for by ordinary people work will get much harder. As it is, Morgunblaðið reported last week that nurses in the acute wards at the hospital Landspítalan walk 12 km in a single shift. These women have far more in common with their male colleagues who also juggle shift working and childcare, than they have with Halla Tómasdóttir & Kristin Pétursdóttir founders of Auður capital whose mission is to 'feminise' banking.

Improved pay and conditions were fought for originally and they will have to be defended by working class women and men. In Britain on November 30th last year public sector workers made up the biggest strike by women in British history. If the cuts are defeated and working class women’s progress is advanced it’ll be because women of our class stand with working class men against all the women bankers, mangers and Prime Ministers of their class.

[1] Author of Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State

[2] Chris Harman, A Peoples’ History of the World

[3] This explains breast implants which I’ll discuss in the next post.

[4] Joan Violet Robinson, Economic Philosophy pg 45

[5] The editor Valdimar Ásmundsson was married to Briét Bjarnhéðinsdóttir, editor of Kvennablaðið

[6] 31st January 1885

[7] Soffía Ólafsdóttir died from burns after she fell into the spring 17th February 1894, also Kristín Ólafsdóttir 25th August 1898. Sbr. ÞÍ Prestþjónustubók Dómkirkjunnar í Reykjavík 1881–1898.

[8] 27th January 1900

[9] Laugavinna 2009 pg 56 of the book or 60 of the pdf online.

[10] 100 aurar = 1kr

[11] Íslandsdætur pg 126
[12] Ebenezer Henderson, Iceland: or, The journal of a residence in that island, during 1814-15..., Volume 1 ‘For upwards of two hundred years, the only    Psalm-book used in the Icelandic church was.. Grallarann.. which first appeared in 1594’. A new Psalm-book was published in 1801 but the Grallarann and its scripturally incorrect old psalms remained popular.

[13] ‘ekki eftirlíking á því sem venjulegum augum sé sýnilegt’

[14] http://www.kvennasogusafn.is/index.php?page=artoel-og-afangar

 

The Progress of some Women is not necessarily the progress of the Class

The majority of Ministers in the Althing are now women. The Icelandic Parliament also has its first ever woman Minister of Finance, Oddný Harðardóttir. Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir is keen we should celebrate these 'developments in equality' in Iceland.

However the Cabinet reshuffle actually has far more to do with the Social Democrats’ determination to take Iceland into the EU which is opposed by Vinstrihreyfingin - grænt, (VG) the Left-Green Movement, most of the opposition in the Althing as well generally as those whose livelihoods rely on fishing or whaling.

Jón Bjarnason of VG has gone from the cabinet, as has Árni Páll Árnason of the Social Democrats (SDP) who is also against Iceland going into the EU.

Steingrímur J. Sigfússon, the Chair of VG who was Finance minister, has been moved to Agriculture and Fisheries. The right wing of the coalition is not able to stay in power without the VG, so they couldn’t get rid of him completely and Jón Bjarnason who was Agriculture and Fisheries Minister, has been highly critical of Steingrímur.  

In a nasty little aside a former SD MP, Anna Margrét Gudjónsdóttir has said Jón Bjarnason ‘should be disciplined for voting against the majority’. Presumably the Social Democrats didn’t have the nerve to have a current MP argue he should vote against his party’s own manifesto and his constituants.

The new Finance Minister, Oddný Harðardóttir, made an election film in 2009 arguing that as everyone needs a decent working life, her party would maximise work opportunities and to do this they must join the EU. With all the European States economies in crisis, she will now preside over more public sector job cuts and rising prices. Rather than promote equality, this government will hit women hardest with more unemployment and social care thrown back on the family.

When Jóhanna says these changes will strengthen the Government, she means its right wing. The real question is what is the Left Green Movement doing in coalition with these people?

The Captain and the Wealth Creators: A seasonal Tale

This jolly tale of fishermen by poet, broadcaster and socialist Michael Rosen appears in this weeks Socialist Worker newspaper.

Starting Where We Are: Early attempts at workers organisation in Iceland

In the late 19^th cent & early 20^th cent, the biggest problems for the emerging working class were unemployment, underemployment, seasonal and casual work. Terrible working conditions and pay were ‘normal’, but 1880 to1910 were the prime years for Icelanders to work aboard the decked fishing boats, þilskip.[1] This work was more dangerous than the old open oar-powered fishing boats because they could cope with worse weather and deeper water and so went out further from the coast. What’s more, the risks were increased by employers and members of Parliament (Alþing) who showed they were willing to restrict the number of life boats to only half the crew to maximise productivity.[2] Presumably the others were meant to swim home. The MP’s and the ship owners thought one pair of drowned hands could easily be replaced by another and the more space aboard for working, the higher the profit - no matter how much fishermen’s lives were insured for.

In 1893 the first group to organise a union for better pay and conditions were not ordinary deckhands but skippers and mates who formed The Wave¸ the Ship Officers Union.[3]

Then on 30^th September 1894, the ship owners formed their own association, Útgerðarmannafélagið, because of ‘the stroppiness of the seamen’, as one of the organisers put it.[4]

This Ship Owners Association immediately tried to lower the wages and conditions of workers on their decked fishing boats in Faxafloí, north of Reykjavík. These rules were agreed just a week later [5] and were meant to be binding on all ship owners concerned until the AGM a year later.

The conditions for crews [6] were;

1. A seaman gets half his catch and has to pay the owner for the salt used for the seaman’s half of the catch.

a.       The half-catch will be paid at a fixed rate, whatever the market price.

b.      Salt for the trosfiskur [7] is free.

c.       The fixed price is 0.9 kr - every cod over 18 inches.

       0.3 kr - 12/18 inches & all haddock.

d.      The owner and crew are to divide the trosfiskur between them.

2a. If a monthly wage is paid it will be 30 kr and 0.3 kr - each cod 18 inches

b. The crew can keep, with the Captain’s permission, up to a quarter of the guts, stomachs and livers of the catch.[8]

c. It is permitted to take fish to eat, from the undivided Trosfiskur.

3. The choice of crew is at the discretion of the Owner regardless of the regulations and customs of the ports covered by the Navigation Act.

4. Captains will get 70 kr per month and 5% of the entire catch or 2 kr for every skippund [9] of the catch.

5. Payment will be in agreed currency.

6. The owners will provide everything on board necessary to fish, including cooking fuel and shall choose the crews food.

7. The crew are to provide their own clothes including wet weather gear.

8. For each transgression of these regulations the fine is 10 kr to be paid into the (owners) Association fund. Though not every ship owner is in the Association, they can still be fined as though they were.

The seamen responded five weeks later [10] with their own Deckhands Union, Sjómannafélagið Báran, wave, a different wave, to ‘maintain and increase the prosperity and rights of seamen’.[11]

Pushed by two students at the Reykjavík College of Navigation (Stýrimannaskólinn) the union started with a foreman, secretary and thirty members including Jón Jónsson, Chair, Hafliði Jónsson and Geir Sigurðsson, Secretary. Then a month later,[12] 80 members agreed and sent their demands to the Ship Owners.

The editor of the magazine Þjóðólfur [13] reported that they had received a letter from the editor of Fjallkona magazine. It said that the deckhands who lived in Reykjavik had joined together to squeeze ‘the higher wages and better conditions out of the ship owners that they used to have’. The editor of Fjallkona asked the editor of Þjóðólfur to print the agreement - that the deckhands would not accept worse wages for the coming year - so that everyone would know how fair the demands of Seaman were! 

    Deckhands     Versus     Shipowners

At least Half the catch/wage paid in money rather than goods	Owners tried to pay the crew mostly in goods, at prices they set themselves
0.10 kr for every cod over 18 inches     0.4 kr - 12/18 inches	0.9 kr for every cod over 18 inches     0.3 kr - 12/18 inches
Or 0.8 kr for cod over 12 in (winter) 0.7 kr  in (spring/summer)
Owners must cover all the crews living/working costs on board as stated in the Navigation Act	See points 6 & 7 above
Our lives worth more than your profit	More work space = more profit =fewer life boats

The seamen knew just how profitable their work was to the owners who squealed about not being able to afford higher wages. Even the banker Tryggvi Gunnarsson, writing in 1902 admitted that the ships were in profit with only half the fishing done. The owners also argued they needed the high profit margins to develop agriculture so it couldn’t be frittered on the seamen. In fact Ship owners were also trying to redress the balance power for themselves against agricultural interests, particularly the farmers who sat in the Alþing.

Other chapters of Báran, such as #4 of Eyrarbakki [14], also had some success. Its members were mostly ‘cottars’, men renting a house with a small patch of land, who fished on the large open rowing boats for the local Danish merchant. In 1905 they demanded hourly instead of daily wages and a minimum wage. They also wanted breeches of the agreement to be fined by the union. The merchant dug his heels in so members of Báran went to the District Governor, who lent on the merchant, who gave in.[15] Perhaps the employers and owners weren’t feeling the heat of the revolutionary mass strikes sweeping Russia in 1905, but they also had no Cossacks and often found themselves isolated in the face of angry half starved men.

Fishermen’s pay increased slowly despite the enormous profits they made for the ship owners. They worked very long hours for weeks at a time and faced ludicrously heavy fines - 100kr for not turning up to ship fit to sail. It was also difficult for the union to meet during the fishing season. Then there was the weather. In 1906 seventy seamen drowned in one great storm in Faxafloí and Báran never recovered. But in the same year Dagsbrún, the Reykjavík General and General Transport Workers Union was founded.

Then there was the Icelandic Printers Union founded 1897 with 12 members who probably held the first ever strike in Iceland in 1899. [16] This lasted one day which is how long it took the print shop owners to give in to all their demands.[17]

When capitalism is expanding employers may quickly agree to reforms because it costs so little but when the next crisis comes round they will do the utmost to maintain profitability by squeezing wages and conditions. The years of developing capitalism in Iceland as everywhere else were continuous class struggle, a ‘now hidden, now open fight’.[18] In this current crisis, the Great Austerity, Iceland’s National bank Landsbanki has just handed over 350 billion Isk or 2.2 billion Euros as the deposit for the Icesave debt. This comes only three days after the charities Help for Families in Iceland[20] and the much older Mothers Support Committee [21] reported that they expected to help at least 4000 families with food and clothing this winter. There is however another tradition in Iceland of mothers helping themselves, so in my next post I’m going to look in more detail at Iceland’s rich history of women workers in struggle from Salt fish workers to the Yarn Strike.

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[1] French fisherman had been catching cod off Iceland for most of the 19^th century but I’ll talk about them and their life in the East Fjords in a later post

[2] Iceland in Transition, Magnús S Magnússon pg 44

[3] Skipstjórafélagið Aldan

[4] ‘vegna heimtufrekju sjómanna’, Tíu Ára Starfssaga, Sjómannafjelag Reykjavíkur pg 13

[5] 7.10.1894

[6] Deck hands, hásetar.

[7] That is skate, pollock, catfish, redfish, etc

[8] 1916 during the First World War the cod liver oil became so valuable that crews struck to keep their right to sell it at market prices.

[9] 1 ship pound, skippund, =160kg, cited Encyclopaedia of Scientific Units, Weights and Measures, Francois Carderelli

[10] 14.11.1894

[11] Tíu Ára Starfssaga, Sjómannafjelag Reykjavíkur pg 15-17

All the union officers were elected annually, the members had to be 18 years old or studying seamanship, and you couldn’t vote if you turned up to meetings drunk. The Secretary had to provide detailed notes of all the decisions taken and the unions funds had to be kept in the National Savings bank. It cost 2 kr to join and 1 kr annually. The first meeting in the year would be held 1st Oct and weekly after, they could call extra meetings if at least ten members wanted to. The main meeting (AGM) would be the last one held in December.

[12] 10.12.94

[13] 14.12.1894

[14] Founded 1903

[15] Hidden Class, Finnur Magnússon pg 49

[16]Iceland in Transition pg 174

[17] Alþýðublaðið 05.04.1977

[18] Communist Manifesto, K Marx & F Engels ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles… oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’.

[20] Fjölskylduhjálp Íslands

[21] Mæðrastyrksnefnd

A Glimmer of good news in the financial gloom - Bankers arrested

The general response in Iceland to the financial crisis is muted at the moment. Politicians, ex-Prime Ministers and Central Bankers can roam the streets more or less unmolested. If justice were done they would be forced to wear bells and orange jumpsuits instead of getting cushy jobs editing right wing papers. This round of arrests isn't going to save anyones job or house but it may put some manners on them.