Iceland's fishing strike casts a wide net

We are often told that workers have less power and their jobs are more precarious because of globalisation. Employers, whether banks, car factories or call centres frequently insist that if a government doesn't give them tax breaks and the workers won't work for the least they are offering, then they will simply move their business and infrastructure to another, cheaper part of the world. But the current fishing strike in Iceland of around 3,500 workers shows that globalisation can mean that workers have more power, not less.

The fish landing dock and market in Grimsby on the east coast of Britain is open 24 hours a day, all the year round and some 75 percent of the fish auctioned there is caught by Icelandic boats. So as the Grimsby Telegraph newspaper reports, if Iceland's fishing strike continues it will quickly starve the market of the fish it must have to make money. There will be fish arriving tomorrow that have already been caught, but on Monday 21 November there will be a serious shortage if the strike continues.

Grimsby's refurbished fish market

The Grimsby Telegraph says that representatives from the North East are already planning to go to Reykjavik if the dispute isn't settled quickly.  It quotes the Chief executive of market operator Grimsby Fish Dock Enterprises, Martyn Boyers, 

"This will resolve itself, it is not permanent, but it is a bad thing. Because of the way the system works we have fish on its way. It won't affect this week but it will the week after. The biggest issue is we don't know how long it will be. Will it be a day and they'll be back fishing tomorrow? Could it be a week?, A month?

"It will not be permanent, but the way business works now there won't be a really good period to cover the bad."

Boyers also points out that Norway, Ireland and Scotland won't be able to fill this gap. And the Grimsby Fish Merchants Association will be trying to lean on the Icelandic ambassador to put pressure on the Icelandic government to get the employers and the unions to end the strike.

Various Icelandic companies operate in Grimsby including Icelandic Group which owns Coldwater, and Saucy Fish Co., and the shipping companies Eimskip and Samskip. Icelandic Group also owns Seachill which is based in Grimsby and claims that the situation has been developing for a long time so it has made contingency plans and the dispute will have no affect on them. It will be interesting to see where its fish is going to come from if the strike continues for any length of time.

Grimsby fish market

Fresh and frozen fish is enormously valuable and each fisher makes large amounts of profit for the owners. But you wouldn't know it from listening to the owners who whine that fishers and trawler workers are extremely well paid and have nothing to complain about.

The president of seafood producers Samherji, Þorsteinn Már Baldvinsson has written an article here in which he explains that many Icelandic fishers earn £100,000s a year and are better off than their Norwegian counterparts. He has less to say about how hard they have to work to earn the money, how long they are away from their families and how tough the conditions can be. He has nothing to say about the long boring trips when little fish is caught, which will happen more often as fish stocks suffer from environmental degradation and the effects of global warming.

It is also worth knowing that Þorsteinn Már Baldvinsson was Chair of Glitnir investment bank when it went belly-up in 2008. And an article published in Iceland last month says that Þorsteinn Már and his and his ex-wife Helga S. Guðmundsdóttir have been paid some 3.5 billion ISK over the last six years from the company Steinn Ehf. which holds their shares in Samherji. Journalist Ingi Freyr Vilhjálmsson points out that this amounts to nearly 6.5 percent of last year's budget for the National Hospital in Reykjavik, almost 65 percent of the revenue of Iceland's National Radio or the wages of 13,500 people on the minimum wage in 2016.

We can be certain of two things here - that whatever the fishing workers want the employers can certainly afford and that they won't stop squealing about it until they are forced to pay up.

Áfram sjómenn!

Áfram Sjómenn - The indefinite trawler fisheries Strike in Iceland is on

Iceland's trawler fishers and marine engineers began an all-out strike tonight at 11 pm after talks broke down a little after 9 pm this evening without a new deal between the fishing unions and employers.

In this video tonight Valmundur Valmundsson of Iceland Seamen's Union, Sjómannasamband Íslands announces that the strike is going ahead. He thanks everyone for their support and says they must stick together in this fight.


Sjómannasamband Íslands (SSÍ) and Marine Engineers in VM Félag vélstjóra og málmtæknimanna rejected the deal proposed by the Association of Fisheries Companies in August this year. This deal meant trawler workers could get wage cuts of up to 15 percent as the ship owners offloaded new taxes and fuel charges onto the fishers and engineers.

An agreement has been reached on the prices to be paid for fish but not on the numbers of crew on each vessel. The Union says there are already too few crew and any fewer would be dangerous.

Last month, fishers in the Iceland Seaman's Union voted by 90 percent to strike indefinitely, if the employers didn't come up with a better deal.

When the ballot ended, 339 members of VM, the Icelandic Union of Marine Engineers and Metal Technicians had voted, a 71.8 percent turn out. Some 90.8 percent voted to strike with only 26 members voting against.

Fishers in the Iceland Seaman's Union, SSÍ voted by almost 90 percent to strike on a 56 percent turn out.

Áfram Sjómenn

Celebrating a militant workers movement, Gúttóslagurinn 9 November 1932

Eighty four years ago today when Iceland was in the grip of the world economic depression, an explosion of working class anger that became known as Gúttóslagurinn - the battle of Gúttó, erupted at a Reykjavik town council meeting.

It was the second of two decisive events that year which meant that for the rest of the 1930s employers and state authorities in Iceland were on the back foot against a militant workers' movement.

In Reykjavik 1932, with 28,000 inhabitants, where 25 percent of working men were unemployed, the town council included some of the establishment's most important people; the Chair Petur Halldorsson, Jakob Moller the Bank Inspector, Jon Olafsson, the bank manager, the doctor Maggi Jul Magnusson and the only woman on the council Gudrun Jonasson. The council intended to rubber stamp its plan to slash the wages paid out for dole work and abolish the hard won coffee break.

Outside Gúttó, possibly on 9 November 1932

Working class anger and organisation in Iceland had been growing for years and by 1932 the communists were leading a united campaign against wage cuts and poverty involving trade unionists, the Social Democrats, Alþýðuflokkurinn and a mass of ordinary workers. Wages had fallen in rural areas where organisation was weak but in 1930 to 1931 communists had organised against violent employers to establish union wage rates.

In July 1932 the town council decided that wages would have to be cut despite months of protest. They had to make some concession to popular anger and a "dole work" programme began in the summer. But it was only for 200 men and was mostly pointless quarry work without any thought of building anything, or even repairing existing roads. The men worked for around six hours a day for an hourly rate of 1.36 krona (kr), but only men with the largest families got work most days in the week. Even with work, 8 or 9 kr a day meant slow starvation.

Militant Trade unions
Dagsbrún, the Reykjavik General Workers Union and the Seaman's Union presented the council with their demands, including a scheme for work creation and infrastructure development and for free food, gas and electricity for the unemployed, who should then not have to pay tax. With an argument that sounds familiar today, the council's majority response was to insist that wage rates were too high and men were unemployed because the unions were preventing them from taking the available jobs at reasonable wages. One very rich councillor, like an aged Marie Antoinette, helpfully added that when he was young and times were hard he had managed by eating catfish instead of cod.

Outside this meeting police battered people struggling to get in to hear what was happening. To add insult to injury the authorities were using the hated Extras, so-called "white troops", unemployed workers hired as police assistants to attack picket lines. Half starved men demanding a right to live fought back.

In the following days workers were jailed for riot, incitement and refusal to answer the court's questions. A Danish King's Decree of 1795 was used against five trade unionists and communists to jail them "at his majesty's pleasure on bread and water". One of the five, Indriða Garibaldardóttir, refused to recognise the court's legality as it was being used by the ruling class as a political weapon against the working class. She pointed out that in the recent banking scandal, government ministers had investigated and then found themselves not guilty. She refused to eat any king's bread, started a hunger strike and was joined by the other four.

Hundreds joined a protest march and every night there was a mass meeting outside the jail with a further march of 4,000 people. A few days later the authorities, too nervous to hold them any longer, released the five into the seething atmosphere of Reykjavik.

The campaign continued through the summer at union meetings and in the communist and SDP newspapers. Dagsbrún and other unions - including Framsókn, the Reykjavik women workers' union, held a mass meeting and protest march. Speakers from both the Social Democrats and Iceland Communist Party urged workers to go to Gúttó, the Good Templars House where the council was to meet, to block the plan on 9 November.

Communist paper, Verkamaðurinn The Worker
describes the police attack on the crowd

The council was so sure that the meeting was only a formality that the wage cards were already printed up with the new, lower dole work rate.

Shocked ruling class

By ten in the morning thousands of angry people filled the square and the streets outside Gúttó. SDP councillors spoke against the wage cut and the Conservatives were heckled and jeered. When lunchtime was called Guðjón Benediktsson, the leader of the Communist Unemployed Workers Committee, demanded that the wage cut be thrown out and the councillors stay until they agreed. The police escorted the Tories out with the promise that everyone in the building would be allowed back in after the break. The only woman councillor, Guðrún Jónas, did not come back, nor did the despised Extras who had been deployed in the morning and seen that they were massively outnumbered.

After lunch only a few of the protesters got back into the building before the meeting restarted. A loudspeaker had been set up outside to relay the meeting so people outside could hear when the police attacked the audience "to clear the entrance". The response that followed shocked Iceland's ruling class. In an explosion of anger the protesters chased the councillors out, smashed the windows of government buildings all over town and fought pitched battles against the police. Gúttó, as the symbol of the authorities' class hatred, was wrecked. Hundreds came to a meeting that night to hear that the wage cut had been overturned. At that moment of victory they did not press their demands, but the arrests made after 9 November had to be abandoned a few days later.

The day after, Tory paper Morgunblaðið reports
Gúttóslagurinn as a mindless attack on cops and councillors 

The authorities spent the rest of the decade blaming each other for the battle of Gúttó. A united front had "stood up in the hair" of the Conservatives and beaten back a government that argued financial crises had a life of their own, were not an inherent characteristic of capitalism itself and meant working class people to pay for them,


Material in this article originally appeared in Socialist Review Iceland's bosses in hot water

Fishers and marine engineers in Iceland vote for all out strike

Fishers in the Iceland Seaman's Union, Sjómannasamband Íslands (SSÍ) and Marine Engineers in VM Félag vélstjóra og málmtæknimanna have voted by 90 percent to strike indefinitely.  If their employers, the ship owners don't come up with a better deal the strike is set to begin on 10 November.

The trawler workers are angry that they haven't had a decent deal from their employers in the Association of Fisheries Companies since 2011. Ship owning bosses have been trying to shift the costs of taxes and fuel onto the workers by getting them to accept wage cuts of around 15 percent.

When the ballot ended at noon today, 339 members of VM, the Icelandic Union of Marine Engineers and Metal Technicians had voted, a 71.8 percent turn out. Some 90.8 percent voted to strike with only 26 members voting against.

Fishers in the Iceland Seaman's Union, SSÍ voted by almost 90 percent to strike on a 56 percent turn out.

Do you want a 15 percent pay cut? 

Icelandic fishing unions heading for all out strike?

This month's issue of British magazine Socialist Review has published my article on the crisis in the British fishing industry under the title, How fishing became a killer issue. Many of the problems described here are blamed on the Commons Fisheries Policies of the European Union (EU) but in Britain's case they have been exacerbated by years of neoliberal government policies and the lack of trade union organisation for ordinary fishers.

Iceland and its fishing industry is not in the European Union and its fishers are unionised but they have still suffered falling wages and are facing more cuts from a new decision agreed in September by the Appeals Committee of Seamen and Fishers, úrskurðarnefndar sjómanna og útvegsmanna.

But union members voted by 66.4 percent to reject this deal that means more wage cuts. The unions, including many in the Association of Seaman's Unions of Iceland, Sjó­manna­sam­band Íslands, (SSÍ) as well as VM Félag vélstjóra og málmtæknimanna, the Icelandic Union of Marine Engineers and Metal Technicians are now balloting on whether to go out on indefinite strike.

Icelandic trawler þerney

The ballot closes at 12 noon on 17 October and if it is agreed then the strike is set to begin on 10 November. The question will then be whether the Icelandic government outlaws the strike as it has done so many times before. If it does, then the workers will either have to put up with falling wages or defy the government, which workers in Iceland have also done before.

Sjómannasamband Íslands announces the strike ballot on its facebook page

Moonstone - the boy that never was

Mánasteinn, drengurinn sem aldrei var til, the novel by Icelandic author Sjón, was published recently in English, in Britain as Moonstone, the boy who never was. My review of it has just appeared in September's Socialist Review.

This short, beautiful novel tells the story of Máni Steinn Karlsson, a movie-obsessed teenager living with his one ancient relative in an attic in the centre of Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1918. Máni Steinn, roams the small town looking for the odd jobs available to a boy who struggles to read and planning which film he will see next. It is a story of young people struggling to be free in a small society under pressure from the shortages of the First World War, the eruption of volcano Katla and soon, from the lethal Spanish flu.

Read the review here. The book is currently available in hardback or ebook from Bookmarks the socialist bookshop and will be out in paperback in February 2017.

The Northern Garrisons - The British Army writes from Iceland, 1941

Iceland occupied Part One

During the Second World War the British Ministry of Information published a series of pamphlets called, The Army at War. These were propaganda to inform and cheer the readers in an accessible, often witty way that was meant to show that the war effort was planned and coherent. The pamphlets were designed to keep people at home in touch in an official way, with what their loved ones were involved in abroad but could not discuss in letters home.

The Ministry of Information employed talented writers and these pamphlets can be moving and poignant. The Northern Garrisons by Eric Linklater is all this about the troops based in the Orkney and Shetland Isles and gives an honest sense of the terror of sailing in the Atlantic convoys being hunted by enemy U-boats. Linklater also, I think, tried to charm angry Icelanders who were deeply unimpressed at the British occupation from 1940.

The Northern Garrisons pamphlet, published 1941

The British government had tried to recruit Iceland, "as a belligerent and an ally", from 9 April 1940 when Germany's forces under the Nazi's invaded Norway and Denmark. It said that Britain could help Iceland maintain its independence by providing an occupying force but Iceland was neutral and had just effectively declared its independence from Denmark after the Nazi's had over run Denmark, so its government refused to co-operate. That didn't stop the British Navy landing Marines in Reykjavik in the early hours on 10 May 1940.

Linklater was not in the landing force and says about his journey to Iceland, 

To travel speedily and well, one should attach oneself, if possible, to a General. There was a General, whose duty was taking him to Iceland when mine also pointed there, and being ordered to join him I crossed the Atlantic in the rapid luxury of a Sutherland flying-boat.

This journey with a three course lunch including steak and kidney pie, took six hours and 55 minutes. He notes that when Iceland Force, as the Allies named it, arrived in Iceland, "they were not received - as ingenuously they had expected - with open arms."

The Icelanders were displeased by the occupation of their country and, being unable to prevent it, they decided to ignore it. To ignore it as far as possible, that is. They assumed towards our troops an attitude of frosty indifference, and our troops, being friendly people, and so sure of the virtue of their cause that they could not see how anyone should doubt it, were sorely puzzled by this reception.

Linklater describes Reykjavik which then had a population of about 40,000 people and politely flatters the locals.

A generation ago the houses were nearly all of wood - farm buildings of turf -  but concrete has now taken the place of timber, and now there are rows of new houses all built according to modern notions of simplicity and functionalism, a rank of windowed cubes with a shelf on each to catch the sun.. There are little hat shops.. with an elegant sample or two of the latest fashions from New York; and there are book shops, half a dozen of them, that put to shame the illiteracy of many an English town of greater size; and there are flower shops where, you may discern a sheaf of roses, a pot of hydrangeas, that have been grown in greenhouses warmed by the hot springs of this icy and volcanic island.

An interesting town, with a brand new university of its own, a National Theatre - not wholly finished yet - and a statue to Leif Ericsson, the Icelander who discovered America.

The pamphlet describes Icelanders as having been flattered for some years by the attentions of German universities who studied Icelandic culture and the Sagas, For this reason, it says a previous generation of Icelandic students who studied in Germany had a nostalgic fondness for Germany with little idea of the realities of the Nazi state. The younger generation, it says, had been courted with cheaper university courses and there was a widespread admiration for German "efficiency". It is true that the relatively few Icelanders then able to go to university, considered Germany to be the European capital of culture, but most Icelanders knew precisely what the Nazi's regime was. Widely circulated leftwing Icelandic newspapers had reported the behaviour of the Nazis all through the 1930s when political polarisation meant some Icelanders admired Nazism and hoped to use it to contain Iceland's own trade unionists, socialists and Communists.

The thaw in relations between the troops and Icelanders, Linklater says, was due to the good sense of Icelanders, the good behaviour of the troops and the good market the British forces provided for Icelandic produce. Iceland had obviously lost it's European markets for fish and sheep produce and Linklater points out how much money the British Army poured into the country in one way or another, including the payment of overtime, for which Icelanders were presumably meant to be grateful.

All the local produce is bought - mutton and milk and fish - and local labour is paid high wages. In March of this year (1941) about £30,000 was paid out in wages; and like his British confrere, the Icelandic labourer is properly compensated for his wounded conscience when he agrees to work on the Sabbath day: 4.50 kronur an hour to be precise; three shillings and fourpence in English money.

This work on the army bases was known as Bretavinna - British work - although everyone agreed the money was good, it was also considered to be boring, menial and degrading to work for the occupiers. But the camp to the south east of Reykjavik was in an area where work was hard to find and people often had to take whatever work was available, even Bretavinna.

Linklater didn't see it that way as an apparent note of irritation crept in at Icelanders' lack of appreciation of the situation,

Camp after camp has been sited far less conveniently than it could have been had we shown less care and regard for the small and scanty fields of the Icelandic farmer.

Clearly, Linklater had no idea what those insignificant fields represented in years of labour, self independence and self respect to the farmers.

To combat boredom and loneliness and provided a bit of news from home, the Iceland Force bought an hour a day of its time from the Icelandic radio broadcasting service and made their own programmes. They also got the local brewery to make stronger beer for the troops. Linklater says, "Icelandic beer is the depressing sort known as near-beer", by which he meant that it was almost alcohol-free, as ordinary alcoholic beer had been illegal in Iceland since 1915. And the brewery couldn't keep up with the troops' demand.

Many members of Iceland Force would have agreed with Linklater when he described, "a fjord, bleak and barren.. and a narrow little village sitting nakedly on a hillside. The houses were white and the hill was white with snow. It all looked very cold and comfortless." An officer who had been in Iceland for nearly a year said appreciatively of the same village:

That's rather a nice little place, isn't it? It must be quite a sun-trap in summer.

 The British troops and Air Force, who were joined in July 1940 by Canadian troops, stayed until Americans troops arrived in 1941. The United States was still technically neutral until it joined the war in December 1941 but the Americans' presence in Iceland by agreement with the Icelandic government, meant that British troops were freed up to fight elsewhere. The continuing occupation divided Icelandic society politically and would, in 1948, cause an explosion of protest against Iceland joining NATO, The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

When Britain's Ministry of Information published The Northern Garrisons in 1941 it was fighting for "hearts and minds" when the Second World War was still in the balance. The German Nazi forces had stormed through Europe to the North Sea coast facing Britain and occupied the Channel Islands. The Russians had not yet beaten General Paulus and the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and it was not at all clear that the Allies would win.

The British government were trying with this pamphlet to reach a mass of ordinary people who on reading it, they hoped, would pass it on to friends and family and feel more involved. It was designed to be a morale booster for the troops in the Northern Garrisons and the British government may have hoped that English-reading Icelanders would also read it and feel part of the wider war. But Icelanders had been fighting for self-determination from Denmark and its servants for too long to be so easily reconciled to this occupation.

Inside cover of The Northern Garrisons: The Army at War