Two weeks earlier the workers at the dam construction project, native- and foreign-born, had won the right for all to join Icelandic unions and be covered by the contracts they negotiate. “It has to be said that the situation has improved” following this victory, said Thorgeir Hauksson, 50, an Iceland-born bulldozer operator. “There was a shift when they [the company] were forced to reveal the salaries of the Romanians.”

Hauksson was referring to the September 14 attempt by the Edersiter company, which works under the Impregilo construction company, the main contractor, to falsely inflate the earnings paid to workers from Romania. Facing pressure from the workers and the unions to improve wages and conditions, the company drew up and attempted to publicize bogus documents listing wages that were higher than it actually pays. The scheme backfired when some of the workers objected.

Hauksson described the workers’ ongoing fight for tolerable conditions. He had been among a group of workers asked to work nightshift, clearing soil from the mountainside, he said. “It was two of us from Iceland and several Portuguese workers who had been doing it for a while. We were expecting to get food at midnight and by midnight someone brought two cheese sandwiches to each of us—dry!”

The workers got hold of a sleeping boss, and he took the two Icelandic workers down to the dining hall. “There was no food there,” Hauksson said, “but we stayed there for our 45 minutes before we went back to work. The boss told us that we would have two food trays waiting for us in the hall the next night. But we said that there had to be food for everyone. Three days later there were food trays for all of us. We would of course not have eaten if the others had not gotten food.

“I would not have believed four months ago that we would be using the methods we have been using,” Hauksson said. He mentioned that his son, Einar Már Thorgeirsson, 23, who drives a truck, has started to carry a digital camera at work in order to document the bosses’ degrading treatment of the workers. He said he had seen a boss physically drag a Portuguese worker out of the machine he was operating.

The company tries to keep the different nationalities separated. Only Icelandic workers occupy the sleeping barracks that we visited. Portuguese workers are in another set of barracks, Romanians in still another, and so on. There are no facilities of any kind to socialize in after work, so workers meet in each other’s bedrooms, in which there is room for just a bed, a closet, and a small desk—or a second bed.

Pouring into the barracks from work at 6:00 p.m., workers said that the bosses had undermined the terms of the contract for the construction site. They had taken out extra pay for working far away in the highlands or very rural areas for a longer period, for example. The employers claimed that they had incorporated this into the regular pay scale, but there is no sign of it.

The employers are also taking advantage of holes in the contract, the workers said. While the agreement states that each worker should have their own bedroom, it allows the bosses to cram two workers into each room during the short summer or if they are there on a short-term basis. They have got away with doubling up the workers from Portugal because they are officially temporary.

We asked the workers what they thought was significant about the right to join the unions. “It must be so, there is no other way in society,” replied Hauksson.

He discussed the possibilities the workers have to improve the tough conditions. Official government and legal channels are loaded against the workers, he said, citing the problem of the crowded, unsanitary dining rooms. “The health representative of the region is frequently criticized, but what can she do?” he said. “She does not have the authority to close the dining facility even though it is unacceptable; she can only write letters and then it takes forever.”

As the correspondents left the worksite and barracks site at 600 meters above sea level, it was 7:00 p.m. and already dark, with snow on the ground and a freezing wind.  
 
 
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