Elon Musk Brings Hardball Anti-Union Tactics To Sweden

The billionaire capitalist is fighting a union drive in Sweden, a country marked by labor harmony, where 90% of workers are covered under collective bargaining agreements.

Striking sanitation workers protest against strikebreakers in Memphis, TN in 1968.

For five years, 130 Tesla mechanics who are members of the Swedish trade union, IF Metall, demanded Tesla sign a union labor contract. The union finally declared a strike a year ago. It is on-going.

Unlike the United States, Sweden’s culture is based upon the collective bargaining model. Ninety percent of Swedish workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements, which underpins decades of economic success in the country. This compares to around 10% of American workers, down from 20% in the 1980s.

As the strike lingered, Swedish dockworkers decided to show solidarity with the striking Tesla union and stopped unloading Teslas cars shipped to Sweden. Tesla started trucking the cars in by land.

PostalNord, the main postal service in Sweden, stopped delivering registration plates to Tesla, which sued the postal service. A Swedish district court judge last week upheld a preliminary ruling that Sweden’s postal service is not required to deliver the license plates to Tesla. The judge said the Swedish constitution forbids the state from intervening in a labor dispute.

Meanwhile, a Swedish magazine discovered Tesla was having license plates shipped to secret locations in Stockholm to avoid union blockades. The magazine tracked packages addressed to Tesla to private villas with the use of airtag transmitters.

Tesla is now asking customers to order their own registration plates.

Strikebreakers

It was reported in May that Tesla is flying foreign “strikebreakers” into Sweden to do the work of the striking union employees.