HUSAVIK, Iceland: Iceland’s prime minister and women across the volcanic island nation went on strike Tuesday to push for an end to unequal pay and gender-based violence.
Icelanders awoke to all-male newscaster teams announcing shutdowns across the island nation: schools closed, public transport delayed, hospitals understaffed, hotel rooms uncleaned.
Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdóttir said that she would stay home as part of the women’s strike — “kvennaverkfal” in Icelandic — and expected other women in her Cabinet would do the same.
Iceland’s trade unions, the main organizers of the strike, called on women and nonbinary people to refuse both paid and unpaid work, including household chores, for the day. About 90% of Icelandic workers belong to a union.
Schools and the health system, which have female-dominated workforces, said they would be heavily affected by the walkout. National broadcaster RUV said it was reducing television and radio broadcasts for the day.
Tuesday’s walkout, which lasts from midnight to midnight, is being billed as the biggest since Iceland’s first such event on Oct. 24, 1975, when 90% of women refused to work, clean or look after children, to voice anger at discrimination in the workplace. In 1976, Iceland passed a law guaranteeing equal rights irrespective of gender.
Since then there have been several partial-day strikes, most recently in 2018, with women walking off the job in the early afternoon, symbolizing the time of day when women, on average, stop earning compared to men.
Iceland, a rugged island of around 380,000 people just below the Arctic Circle, has been ranked as the world’s most gender-equal country 14 years in a row by the World Economic Forum, which measures pay, education, health care and other factors. No country has achieved full equality, and there remains a gender pay gap in Iceland.
