Icelandic Unions (isl: stéttarfélag)

Iceland has many unions and they are a central component to getting overall higher wages in Iceland. In addition to the direct work benefits. They also have many other perks such as cabins in the countryside, some health re-imbursements, and continuing education re-imbursements.

There's the Icelandic Confederation of Labour (isl:Alþýðusamband Íslands ASÍ) which is the largest collection of unions working together. At the time of writing this blogpost, their membership consists of 47 unions.

ASÍ has a comprehensive guide on Icelandic labor law in both English and Icelandic at https://www.asi.is/vinnurettarvefur/vinnurettur/icelandic-labour-law/. It's worth going over. For example, the section titled Contract of Employment and related rules says that Fixed Term Employment may not be continuous for more than two years. Fixed Term Contracts are another term for temporary contracts.

While most unions have additional benefits like vision, learning reimbursements, increased vacation days, higher wages, some have much lower monthly union dues and thus fewer benefits. Unions with a large concentration of members in a specific company tend to like having one of them become a union representative.

Some unions are closely tied to pension funds. For example, VR is related to live.is but they operate completely separately.

Types of Unions

The biggest unions in Iceland are VR and Efling. BHM is a umbrella union for university graduates.

There is a union for the software development field, called Stéttarfélag tölvungarfræðinga. Their benefits are supposed to be pretty good.

Smelters are a big industry within Iceland so there are multiple unions. Example, the Rio Tinto smelter workers are in these five unions: Félag rafeindavirkja, Félag íslenskra rafvirkja, FIT, VM, and Hlíf.

Eligibility

Not everyone can join all unions. Other professions with specialized unions are bankers and teachers. For example, people without teaching degrees in schools do not qualify for the teacher's union.