Iceland review - 2006, Síða 55

52 ICELAND REVIEW ICELAND REVIEW 53
Kenia Arias Alencar, who was going to fill her tray for breakfast, is a
39-year-old woman from Sao Paulo. In Brazil, she earned about USD
300 a month as a secretary. Here, she makes five times more as an
assistant supervisor of the cleaning staff. “My friends in Brazil think
I am lucky and I making money,” Alencar said. “But I can only see
my family once a year because they live so far away, and Impregilo
doesn’t pay for tickets home.”
Other workers I talked to did go home for holidays, even as far as
China, and most people I met talked about the good wages and seemed
content. Many even found boyfriends and girlfriends in the camp, or
were later joined by their partners who were hired by Impregilo.
But at the beginning of construction, the Icelandic Confederation
of Labor (ASÍ) learned that there was a 10-to-15-percent difference
between Icelandic and foreign workers’ salaries.
ASÍ lawyer Ingvar Sverrisson says the union’s relationship with
Impregilo was very tense in 2003 and 2004. “We learned that they
were paying low wages to foreign workers,” says Sverrisson. “Impregilo
won the competition over other general contractors because of its
low-budget proposal based on cheap labor from poor countries,” he
continues. “They hired Portuguese, Polish, Eastern European and
Chinese workers for a lower price. But by law, a company is not
allowed to differentiate among workers based on nationality.”
Sverrisson says the unions negotiated an agreement with Impregilo,
who showed money transfers to the union’s lawyers. The union found
that Portuguese workers were underpaid with the reasoning that they
were being paid through foreign temporary employment agencies.
Porta, however, denies that there was ever any wrongdoing on
Impregilo’s part. He says the monitoring results proved the workers
in question were paid in accordance with the collective agreement.
By either account, there is no major dispute today over workers’
current salaries. Sverrisson says salaries have been standardized to the
Icelandic collective agreement, and are under constant monitoring by
a union representative on site at Kárahnjúkar.
There is, however, still a discrepancy over whether legal action has