Tesla may have picked an unwinnable fight with Sweden’s powerful unions — The first ever strikes and a solidarity blockade against the US carmaker could force it to rethink its entire anti-union model::The first ever strikes and a solidarity blockade against the US carmaker could force it to rethink its entire anti-union model, says journalist Martin Gelin
I think Musk is caught up so deeply in his far right delusions by now that rethinking anything is just not on the cards.
I just hope he just crashes and takes that whole far right shit with him. Unfortunately, looking at the Netherlands, it doesn’t look good.
Just because Wilders got the most votes doesn’t mean he gets to form a government. Let’s just hope sanity prevails.
I heard that there were already plans for protests. I’m considering to join them.
The further you go, the harder it becomes to question why something is wrong, because if this small thing is wrong, is that other thing also wrong, and then this other thing, and before you realize it, it’s all been wrong, and that’s too hard to even begin to explore.
For you outside Sweden: There is no such thing as minimum wage. It’s perfectly legal to hire someone for 0 SEK / month.
The whole idea is that a collective agreement should be negotiated and agreed upon by the employers and employees in each business area (like telecom, healthcare, factory workers, electricians etc etc). The idea is that the employers and employees, not the politicians, knows more about what their market/business area requires and is able to deliver in the form of minimum wage, yearly salary increase, vacation and overtime (among other things) .
Here’s the thing that often is different in discusions like the one about Tesla refusing to sign a collective agreement: Collective agreements only limits the minimums. So the only reason to refuse to sign is if you intend to keep some thing below the levels that are the norm in your business area.
Essentially, you’re trying to get unfair competitive advantage.
I am always impressed by the European laws, they are way ahead of anything. Honestly congrats to Sweden
That’s broadly not how the labour market works in Europe - but it does in Scandinavia, where the unions “won” (and long may they reign). Almost EVERYONE is in a union, most unions have negotiated a seat on the board of the business and as a result, the union-employer relationship is SO different to elsewhere. This includes the need for state interventions like minimum wage or work time maximums (except the EU directives on work time maximums, which the Nordic countries felt very uncomfortable adopting as it felt like an unnecessary intervention).
Consequently, the unions have “grown up” and don’t reflexively reject any labour market adjustments required. They act as a mature partner, even through redundancies, working to minimise and help people move on.
Partnered with the Scandinavian “flexicurity” model, where it’s very easy to hire and very easy to fire people, but the state has strong support for unemployed people in between jobs (education, financial support), the labour market is probably the most efficient in the world.
Social democracy, yo. It works.
I agree except for my point in life and with all factors consider, I need it to be hard to fire lol
If your flat, food, and education gets paid for by the government while you are in between jobs, why be afraid of being fired?
Because i live in NA and its expressly NOT like that and also we dont have any free shit to the extent thats a viable option to be able to just suddenly decide to go do.
Edit: my flat/food/education are nowhere near paid for, our welfare state sucks and and thats why I think Nordic countries are superior and we’re American bootlicking fucking morons.
ah sorry, I thought we are talking about a hypothetical where you are living in a system similar to the nordic ones.
Kudos to them for figuring this out. One worker might be convinced that they should only get a small amount of pay for their working hours. But gather a large group of workers in the same field of work, and the group is harder to manipulate into a low pay situation. Nice.
It’s similar across Europe it sets a bare minimum. It doesn’t work as effectively across Europe though.
In Italy for example there is a set of National contracts depending on the type sector. But there’s plenty of ways to bend the rules.
There are plenty of water to bend the rules in Sweden too. Sweden always sounds like the utopia when the press describes things like this.
Journalists also wants food on the table and roof over their heads I guess…
This is the guy who shit-posted so hard he had to buy Twitter. I don’t think smart business is at the front of his mind.
“We live in a meritocracy” btw
Tesla is taking out wanted ads to hire scabs.
Disgusting company, adapt to our model or go home.
Keep pressure on both sides- shame the people that still buy them. Make those scabs useless
that would be great of course but you know who’s very ready to double down and lose billions instead of saying ‘uhmm you know what I think I was wrong and I need to correct course’?
yeah that guy
Scandinavia is pretty hooked on EVs. If Norway and Denmark pick up on this, it will not only harm Tesla but give the competition a really strong advantage to establish a competition that already is threatening Tesla’s market shares
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Yeah… The absolutely completely pro-union Chinese EV car makers…
It’s possible competition will just recognize their advantage and pay workers more to get that step ahead.
Polestar? ID3-5? There are options.
Polestar is Chinese.
Sort of. The parent company is Chinese, but you don’t see the Swedish unions having massive strikes with Volvo or Polestar workers and they are headquartered there.
Maybe the reason why the Swedish unions aren’t having massive strikes with Polestar workers might be slightly related to the fact that the are no Swedish workers in Polestar?
It is headquartered in Torslanda outside Gothenburg, Sweden. Its vehicles are produced in China, home to Volvo’s corporate parent Geely.
It is true that there’s no Polestar manufacturing in Sweden and Tesla’s dispute seems to centre on those workers in Sweden. However there are still a couple of thousand Polestar employees in Sweden, whereas the Tesla action is against only ~120.
It is not just factory workers that are striking and getting involved. Every field in Sweden is unionised and it is not even just Tesla employees taking action against the company. As the link above states, dockworkers who are not affiliated with Tesla are refusing to unload their cars.
But Polestar has signed collective agreements in Sweden.
Signing a collective agreement doesn’t in any way change the fact that Polestar is a Chinese company that manufactures their product in China and that China is not pro union.
So does Volvo and they haven’t done much against unions. Chinese companies seem to adapt a bit easier to wherever they do business while American companies seem hellbent waging war against themselves like tesla do now.
American workers: scribbles notes furiously
Then throws the notes away and calls everyone commies, guaranteeing their own low wages, long hours, and unsafe work conditions.
This is how strikes work. Not 1000 Amazon employees on black Friday.
Have to build up enough momentum and regulation to overcome the very determined, active, anti-union attacks of Amazon (or Sbux, etc)
A US business rethink an anti-union model? Even businesses with unions would be happy to get rid of them here. They’re not going to rethink anything, they’ll expend every possible effort to avoid bending a knee to a union, especially a foreign one.
They literally can’t sell cars any more in Sweden, on account of the postal service having a sympathy strike and no longer delivering registration plates to them. Using the postal service is the only legal means of obtaining registration plates, and without them it’s not permitted to sell a car.
So either they rethink or they leave the Swedish market entirely.
Billionaires like to talk a lot about different kinds of ideologies, but at the end of the day, they all have the same ideology - Money. Put them in a situation where they clearly are going to make less without signing, and the signature will all of a sudden not be an impossibility any more.
the postal service having a sympathy strike and no longer delivering registration plates to them
Oh wow that’s insane 😂
Welcome to the Swedish labour market. Companies have tried and failed before to resist union negotiations.
the postal service having a sympathy strike and no longer delivering registration plates to them. Using the postal service is the only legal means of obtaining registration plates, and without them it’s not permitted to sell a car.
Best.
Makes you tear up a little with pride, doesn’t it.
They literally can’t sell cars any more in Sweden, on account of the postal service having a sympathy strike and no longer delivering registration plates to them. Using the postal service is the only legal means of obtaining registration plates, and without them it’s not permitted to sell a car.
How does that work? Do the postal workers see the return address of (the local equivalent of) the DMV and refuse to deliver if they see a Tesla in the driveway? If not, how do they not block other brands?
While I can only speculate on this, if I had to guess I would say that the company selling the cars must sell them with the plates already attached. As such, you can refuse to deliver mail to Tesla addresses.
Technically the buyer could get them road legal after the fact but that would be such a big mess at the volume of sales a company like Tesla would have. Just figuring out delivery when the car can’t be driven at that scale sounds insane
This is actually the one part of this whole strike I disagree with.
The government signed an agreement that prevents license plates from being delivered other than via this postal union. You can’t pick them up or get them any other way (that I’m aware of today)
It is a de-facto ban on car sales if you don’t sign a collective agreement, and there’s no way this was intended by the government.
IMO this is going to be challenged. The government should not have been able to make an agreement like this. It’s just some unintended consequence that has never surfaced before.
What if something else happened that prevented the mail from this one union from being delivered indefinitely? ALL auto manufacture sales would halt if that happens.
I think there’s a fair chance of this successfully being challenged, OR, the agreement being altered prior to being challenged to provide another way to get plates directly from the government, or to allow the citizens themselves to pick up the plates.
Edit: And in case it wasn’t clear, I don’t see a problem with this as long as citizens can get a plate, even if that makes Tesla and their lives more difficult.
To be clear, this is the government-owned postal service that does the deliveries of these license plates. They have other privileges on account of being the official postal service.
There are other legal consequences to not bargaining and signing a union contract in Sweden, this is quite simply the way the Swedish labour market works.
Other companies have been de-facto banned from the Swedish market before by refusing to bargain in the past (Toys’R’Us for example), I don’t see why Tesla’s case would be any different. Were I to be a judge to receive this case, I would question why Tesla would refuse to do something so mundane and universally expected as to bargain with the unions. Upon not receiving a good reason as to not do it, I would then promptly throw that case into the trash where it belongs.
As expected, Tesla has sued, and won an injunction pending the lawsuit to be allowed to pick up the mail.
This is why this is different.
Toys R Us wasn’t legally prevented from selling anything. It was just wasn’t worth the trouble it was causing.
Tesla cannot sell anymore due to a government signed contract that prevents delivery in any other way.
That’s why this is different.
Plenty of US businesses play ball with the European norms when they function in Europe. The big US car manufacturers (Ford, and GM back before they sold Opel/Vauxhall) are unionised in Europe.
They recognise that the game they play at home in the States is very different to the game in Europe.
That Tesla isn’t smart enough to figure out the same thing is not an enormous surprise.
Communist Sweden
/s
I’m honestly surprised, that there are not more Americans loudly calling the Scandinavian countries communist. Being some of the most socialist countries in the world.
The mic Sweden with Switzerland. This is why. /s
May the might of the Swedish unions always be in their favour.
I fucking love this story.
Euuuuurope!!
Meanwhile in the USA I believe the supreme Court recently ruled that unions are responsible for repaying companies for striking…
If memory serves, I don’t think there were any actual damages in this case. They left a truck with a bunch of wet concrete and told someone, and the company had to haul ass so the concrete wouldn’t solidify and break the truck. They did just that. It’s ridiculous to ask for damages for that.
If they had left a fire or volatile process unattended, that would be different. Or if they created a gigantic mess for their coworkers to handle. But this isn’t either of those.
That’s why you don’t fuck with vikings.
Or just the Norse in general, reminder that it was Norsemen who guarded the Roman Emperor in Constantinople.
Viking was not a nationality, it was a job, so your point is in some ways more accurate.
That and what we generally think of as “Vikings” were actually Danes, which is an insult to Swedes.
Hence why I specified Norse, Vikings could just as easily be called pirates or reevers.
But then the She Vikings, ooofff
This is the best summary I could come up with:
What started as a minor local disagreement has grown to the point that it could have global implications, with potential ripple effects for labour movements and auto workers across Europe and the US.
The financial tech company Klarna recently had to give way after several years of attempting to resist collective bargaining agreements, and settled with employees in a victory for white-collar unions.
In the US, Tesla has been involved in a number of scandals over the past decade, with allegations relating to workplace safety, racial discrimination, sexual harassment, labour violations and unlawful practices to curb unionisation efforts.
When United Auto Workers organised strikes at the “big three” car companies – General Motors, Ford and Stellantis – in Michigan this summer, three-quarters of Americans said they supported it.
(Donald Trump also showed up in Michigan, but gave a speech at a non-unionised car parts maker, which was equally characteristic of his signature working-class cosplay without policy substance.)
For Musk, there are reasons to worry that his business model could be challenged, as the fight in Sweden reverberates with the strengthening power of labour organisers across American unions.
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