Living Inside the Meltdown

The Crisis Has Made Icelanders Less Greedy

Nuno Valentim and Jorge da Silva Veiga are both from Portugal. Jorge came to Iceland in 2000 to work on the construction of the Smáralind shopping mall. Nuno and his wife came in 2007 at the suggestion of a friend. They were both working as manual labourers when the collapse happened – Nuno as a house painter, and Jorge as a construction worker.

NUNO: I came to Iceland in April 2007. A friend of mine was living here and said Iceland was great. He told me we could have a very nice life here. In Portugal I had my own company and he asked me: What the hell are you doing putting lots of hours into a business that is almost bankrupt? I was earning the same amount as I could earn working at just a normal job in Iceland. So my wife and I decided to take a risk and try something new.
Of course, at that time the exchange rate was a little different from what it is now.
Our first jobs in Iceland were working in a fish processing factory in Hafnarfjörður. It took us one day to find those jobs. We began by staying with my friend, renting a room in his flat. We had brought some money with us, enough to get us started.
Soon afterwards we moved from my friend’s place and rented our own small apartment. Our landlord owned a house painting company and he offered me work. I thought, sure, why not. So I learned how to paint walls and do all sorts of decorating. My wife saw an advertisement in the paper for a support worker at a pre-school in Garðabær. She applied and got the job.
My landlord, as it turned out, was a guy who liked to hire people to work black – illegally. I discovered when I went to the tax office that he had been deducting taxes from me but not paying them to the government. So I had no security. For example, I could not have collected unemployment if I had needed to, and if I had become sick I would have been in trouble. So there was a scene – I quit working for him and immediately moved out of the apartment. Thankfully we found another place to rent in Hafnarfjörður. It was very difficult to find something to rent at that time.
By September 2008, when the banks started running into trouble, I had changed jobs and was working for a larger house painting company. I remember the collapse very well. The first bank, Glitnir, went down on a Monday. Everybody was listening to the radio. I went to the office to speak to my boss about what might happen. I took one look at his face and said: This is not good. And he answered: No, it is not good.
I knew the economy was not all right. The big fluctuation in the exchange rate was the first thing we noticed. I was sending money home to Portugal to pay off some debts so I was watching the exchange rate very carefully. But I was certainly not expecting a collapse. I mean, we’ve had these sorts of economic problems in Portugal for the last 50 years. We’re used to the crisis thing. But I would never in a million years have thought all the banks would collapse.
So Glitnir went down, and then the next week, both Landsbanki and Kaupthing collapsed in the same week.
My wife and I had bought an apartment in summer 2008. When the collapse happened I was renovating it – painting the walls, putting in flooring, things like that. So my first thought when the collapse happened was, I’ve bought this apartment so we’re stuck in Iceland. We couldn’t just return the apartment. We had to stay and fight.
Around the middle of October 2008 we started hearing rumours that the company I worked for was in trouble. It was without credit lines, had lost many contracts and would have to lay off a lot of people. I wasn’t too worried, though, because my boss had told me that I would be kept on. I was a hard worker, I had my own car, put everything in the car and went out to jobs on my own. But then suddenly everyone was being laid off and my boss told me he was really sorry but he couldn’t keep me on. This happened on the same day that we were moving into our new place. I had all my furniture in the back of the car and was transporting it to my new place when my boss called and told me I was fired. I went to pick up my termination letter with the furniture still in the back of my car. It was the hardest moment of my life.