By Niamh Kennedy | CNN
Ladies throughout Iceland – together with the prime minister – will go on strike Tuesday as a part of a marketing campaign pushing for larger gender equality within the nation.
This would be the seventh time that girls in Iceland strike within the identify of gender equality, marketing campaign organizers mentioned on their official web site. The primary strike came about on October 24, 1975.
“On 24 October, all ladies in Iceland, together with immigrant ladies, are inspired to cease work, each paid and unpaid. For the entire day, ladies (and non-binary individuals) will strike, to show the significance of their contribution to society,” organizers mentioned.
The strike, which is called the “Ladies’s Day Off” or “Kvennafrí” in Icelandic, hopes to boost consciousness in regards to the “systemic” wage discrimination and gender-based violence confronted by ladies in Iceland, in accordance with organizers.
Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir advised Icelandic information web site Iceland Monitor on Friday that she is not going to work on the strike day and expects different feminine members of presidency to do the identical “in solidarity with Icelandic ladies.”
“As you realize, we have now not but reached our objectives of full gender equality and we’re nonetheless tackling the gender-based wage hole, which is unacceptable in 2023. We’re nonetheless tackling gender-based violence, which has been a precedence for my authorities to sort out,” Jakobsdóttir mentioned.
Her authorities had beforehand dedicated to eradicating the gender pay hole by 2022.
Icelandic employers have traditionally gotten behind the strikes and never prevented or docked the pay of staff who take part, in accordance with organizers.
This 12 months’s strike has the backing of the nation’s largest federation of public employees unions, the Federation of the Public Staff Union in Iceland (BSRB), the Icelandic Nurses’ Affiliation and the Icelandic Affiliation of Ladies’s Associations, amongst others.
Organizers are drawing specific consideration to the plight of immigrant ladies whose “invaluable” contribution to Icelandic society they are saying is “not often acknowledged or mirrored within the wages they obtain.
Writing for CNN in 2019, Jakobsdóttir described how testimonies from migrant and ethnic minority ladies marked a turning level in Iceland. “They revealed that whereas Iceland has made internationally acknowledged progress on gender equality, we have now not sufficiently confronted the intersections of gender, racial and sophistication injustices,” she wrote.
Organizers have known as on males to indicate their help for ladies hanging by “taking up extra duties” in house and at work which is able to allow feminine and non-binary companions/ colleagues to strike.
In the meantime, the Icelandic authorities is targeted on a lately launched analysis mission into the wage disparity between professions historically dominated by males versus these dominated by ladies, in accordance with Jakobsdóttir.
“We’re taking a look at how these jobs are totally different… as a result of we estimate that the distinction in wages that exists is because of this,” Jakobsdóttir mentioned.
