How mechanics want to beat Elon Musk

Unions in Sweden are fighting for a collective agreement with electric car maker Tesla. Its boss Elon Musk is not enthusiastic about it.

That forty car mechanics in Sweden Teslaworkshops can bring the richest man in the world to his knees seems impossible. In any case, their nearly six-month strike to enforce the collective agreement pushed Elon Musk into public ire. “This is crazy,” wrote the boss of Tesla’s 130,000 workers worldwide on Twitter’s successor X, while several unions in Sweden started sympathy campaigns. For example, by preventing the unloading of Teslas in local ports. “I think the storm passed us,” he assured himself in a podcast this week, saying that Tesla in Sweden was “in good shape.”

Elon Musk hates unions and collective bargaining agreements

Strike guards are still standing in front of eleven Tesla service stations. Marie Nilsson, chairman of the IF Metall union, has just described this small but longest industrial dispute in her country in 80 years as “a historic struggle between workers and employers”: “Now is the time It is more important than ever that we let’s stick together and endure.”

More than 10,000 Tesla workers in Grünheide, Brandenburg, also know that Musk hates unions and rejects collective agreements. After the works council elections in March, factory manager André Thierig was looking forward: “Many of our workers spoke out against the IG Metall works council, which now has 16 out of 39 members of the works council, they called for workers’ council.” in his election manifesto the collective agreement was timidly listed as the last step, as the long-term goal of better times and a more organized people.

In Sweden, around 70 percent of the workforce is unionized, and collective agreements cover 90 percent of all jobs. Here too, many more young companies with global names like Uber and Amazon are following the same tax-free path as Tesla. With less pay, more difficult working conditions and less job security, of course.

Attackers are harassed by Tesla

Against this background, the strike of a few Tesla workers that began on October 27 has become a fundamental conflict in defense of the “Swedish Model”. Musk saw him as “mad” and “stormy” because of the compassionate actions of the unions that were not directly affected. In addition to the blockade of port workers (including neighboring Scandinavian countries), the postal union stopped all deliveries directed to Tesla. Garbage is no longer being picked up from service stations, and unionized electricians no longer want to maintain or reinstall Tesla charging stations.

The labor side was further angered by the fact that Tesla had replacement workers brought into the workshop to replace the mechanics involved in the strike. This has not happened in Sweden since the basic agreement between trade unions and employers in 1938. However, the initial conclusion is that the strike guards at the factory gates could never prevent even one striker from working. Tesla has kept its sales figures strong in recent months and succeeded in changing the transportation of new cars from sea to truck. From the beginning, only 40 of Tesla’s 120 affected mechanics participated in the strike.

Therefore, perhaps as a first step towards a soft landing and at the same time to save face, in the middle of the week the trade union newspaper “Arbetet” read about several “secret meetings” between IF Metall and Tesla. In fact, this was legally required collective decision meetings in the company, having nothing to do with the collective bargaining dispute. But steel union expert Karl-Henrik Rosberg from Gothenburg was quoted as saying that the “negotiation climate” was good. And: “We wanted to show Tesla that we want a good relationship and that we are not dangerous.”