Þorvarður Bergmann Kjartansson

Experience in community engagement

I was first elected to the Board of VR 2019 as an alternate and then as a member a year later. I have worked in all kinds of committees for the Board, but I am extremely pleased with my work on the Future Committee, which I have chaired for several years. The committee does important work in anticipating changes due to technological innovations and working out solutions for how we protect the interests of our members in this great transformational process, e.g. with industrial democracy and just transition in the broadest sense.

In 2020, I was elected to the Board of ASÍ-UNG, and last year, I took part in the formation of the VR Youth Council and later its formal establishment through the Board. In VR’s Youth Council, I take part in advocacy for VR’s members who are 35 years old or younger, which is about half of VR’s members.

Main focuses

Of the many possible issues – housing issues, the shortening of the work week, a just transition and how VR organises itself as a union to manage the needs of its members, I would like to pay special attention to industrial democracy. In most EU countries and all the Nordic countries, except Iceland, there is a right to industrial democracy, where the employees of larger companies have the right to appoint a certain number of representatives to the boards of the companies they work for. European trade unions actually see industrial democracy as one of the foundations of “co-determination”, along with collective bargaining rights. As the fourth Industrial Revolution progresses, it will become an essential tool in the advocacy of working people in a world of rapid technological change. In addition, we need to push for an amended legal environment that allows working people to establish employee co-operatives, companies that are entirely owned by employees and are democratically managed.