Digital Piecework

In 1975 women in Iceland went on strike, bringing the entire nation to a standstill. For one full day, referred to now as "the long Friday," 90 percent of women didn't show up to their jobs, and refused to cook, clean, or look after children and the elderly. Men scrambled—overwhelming restaurants with food orders and working longer and harder than usual in attempt to do both care work and their paid work. The point of the strike was to draw attention to what socialist feminists had been arguing for decades: economies are built upon women's unpaid labor. Their action showed how capitalism has a propensity to make invisible the labor of people with little political power—both by refusing to recognize it as work and by refusing to pay for it.