Swedish Labor Unions Are Undaunted By Tesla Intrasigence

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One thing you can say about Elon Musk is that once he gets an idea into his head, he doggedly sticks to it against any attempts to change his mind. This can be both a blessing and a curse. There is an old expression that says minds are like parachutes — they only work when they are open. Whether it is a Tesla car that can drive from Los Angeles to New York City and park itself in a Manhattan garage without any human input, rockets that fly backwards so they can be reused, purchasing Twitter, or building 10 billion humanoids in the next decade, Musk is undeterred by any whose thinking differs from his own.

Usually, that means he gets his own way, because most people get worn down in the face of such obstinacy. Not labor unions in Sweden. For over a year, Swedish industrial union IF Metall has been demanding better wages, benefits, and conditions for mechanics in Tesla repair shops across the country. It is the first and only strike against Tesla anywhere in the world, and has now become the longest running strike in Sweden in the past 100 years. In April, six months into the dispute, Musk said, “Actually, I think the storm has passed on that front, I think things are in reasonably good shape in Sweden.” That was not true then, and it is not true now, The Guardian reports.

Tesla Strike Attracts Support

Since the strike began a year ago, other unions have elected to support the Swedish workers. That means the shipping of Tesla cars to Swedish ports has been blocked, the cleaning of Tesla facilities has been halted, postal deliveries for Tesla — including new license plates — to all Tesla offices no longer take place, and connecting new Tesla Supercharger stations to the power grid has been interrupted. Tesla has repeatedly lost legal battles against these solidarity strikes and was recently required to pay SEK6.5m ($607,000) in legal costs to PostNord, the Swedish postal service.

Twelve Swedish trade unions are involved and three Nordic ones, including Norway’s transport union Fellesforbundet and 3F Transport in Denmark. Meanwhile, Tesla has brought in strikebreakers from the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Denmark, and many other European countries to cover the 52 striking workers — almost half of Tesla mechanics in Sweden. While legal under Swedish law, the use of strikebreakers is anathema to unions and employers alike in Nordic countries where unwritten rules and norms are essential to their model of worker protection. The tradition of collective agreements between employer and employees negotiated via a union is strong in those countries. In Sweden, almost 90% of the workforce is covered by a collective agreement, across all sectors. “But for Tesla, this seems to be of little concern to its notoriously anti-union CEO,” The Guardian says.

Fundamentally, what is at stake is the Swedish labor market model of collective bargaining, which Musk refuses to recognize. The determined opposition by IF Metall stems in part from a realization that the long standing collective bargaining framework that is the norm in Nordic countries could crumble and lead to a situation in which an employer could simply fire employees the way Musk did when he got rid of nearly the entire Supercharger team in a fit of pique last spring because the head of that group dared to disagree with him.

Beyond Sweden

The dispute is about more than license plates and janitorial services. IG Metall is one of Germany’s most powerful unions. It wants to represent the workers at the Tesla factory in Grünheide, the only Tesla factory in Europe. Johan Järvklo, the international secretary of IF Metall, has said: “It’s really a global struggle and Sweden is currently at the forefront.” The way the union sees it, allowing Tesla to get away without signing an agreement would risk encouraging other employers in Sweden and Europe to do the same. From Tesla’s point of view, there is the concern that saying yes to collective bargaining in Sweden could be used as leverage by unions in other countries where Tesla has factories and many more employees, including the United States.

Although the concerns expressed by Tesla may be understandable, they indicate a limited understanding of European industrial relations systems, according to The Guardian. Joining a union is a fundamental right of all Swedish workers. Almost half of Tesla mechanics in Sweden are union members, which means by law Tesla has to negotiate with the union on many issues, even if no collective agreement has been signed. IF Metall recently filed a lawsuit against Tesla for failing to inform and negotiate with union members over workplace changes as required by Swedish labor law.

In addition, in some parts of Europe, collective bargaining agreements with one company in an industry or region extend by law to most other companies in that industry or region. This is the case in Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland and France, where firms must comply with extended collective bargaining agreements whether they have signed them or not.

Tesla Union Agreements In France

Although Tesla boasts that it “has no collective agreement anywhere in the world,” German Bender, the author of report for The Guardian, says he has uncovered three local agreements between Tesla France and the largest union in France, CFDT. Those agreements are registered on Légifrance, the official website of the French government for the publication of legal documents such as collective agreements, he says. Bender is the chief analyst at the progressive Swedish think tank Arena and a senior research associate at the Harvard Law School Center for Labor and a Just Economy. “I believe this new discovery could help to resolve the Swedish stalemate and prevent disputes in other countries,” he writes. “Since Tesla already has to comply with collective agreements in many countries and even has local agreements in France, it would not be setting a precedent if it did the same in Sweden. So it should start to see unions as a partner to negotiate with, rather than an enemy.”

He notes that Tesla’s own global human rights policy says, “in conformance with local law, Tesla respects the right of workers to form and join trade unions of their own choosing … or to form and join other employee representative bodies … to bargain collectively. If the company operated in the spirit of this policy, it should be perfectly able to adapt to different countries’ regulations and norms and prevent this unnecessary strike in Sweden from continuing any further into its second year, Bender says. He clearly does not understand how Elon Musk thinks.

Esther Lynch, the general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, said recently, “Musk can make up his own rules when he reaches Mars, but if you want to do business in Europe, then you need to play by Europe’s rules, and that means respecting our tradition of collective bargaining.” Ms. Lynch has also never had an opportunity to have a private conversation with the great and powerful Musk. This is the classic case of the irresistible force — European labor policy — meeting the immovable object — Musk. Time to break out the popcorn!