Sweden’s Tesla Blockade Is Spreading

[bnew]

Sweden’s Tesla Blockade Is Spreading

Starting Friday, dockworkers in all Swedish ports will refuse to offload Teslas, cleaning crews will no longer clean showrooms, and mechanics won’t fix charging points as the labor dispute rages on.

www.wired.co.uk

Sweden’s Tesla Blockade Is Spreading​

Starting Friday, dockworkers in all Swedish ports will refuse to offload Teslas, cleaning crews will no longer clean showrooms, and mechanics won’t fix charging points as the labor dispute rages on.

Tesla's Service Center in Segeltorp, south of Stockholm, where workers strike for the signing of a collective agreement, October 27, 2023.PHOTOGRAPH: JESSICA GOW/GETTY IMAGES

Swedish workers are uniting against Tesla. From tomorrow, cleaners will stop cleaning Tesla showrooms, electricians won’t fix the company’s charging points, and dockworkers will refuse to unload Tesla cargo at all Swedish ports. What started as a strike by Tesla mechanics is spreading, in something Swedish unions describe as an existential battle between Elon Musk’s carmaker and the conventions they say make the country’s labor market fair and efficient.

The standoff in Sweden is the biggest union action the company has faced anywhere in the world. Sweden doesn’t have laws that set working conditions, such as a minimum wage. Instead these rules are dictated by collective agreements, a type of contract that defines the benefits employees are entitled to, such as wages and working hours. For five years, industrial workers’ union IF Metall, which represents Tesla mechanics, has been trying to persuade the company to sign a collective agreement. When Tesla refused, the mechanics decided to strike at the end of October. Then they asked fellow Swedish unions to join them.
“Collective agreements form the backbone of the Swedish labor market model,” says Mikael Pettersson, head of negotiations at the electricians’ union, which plans to join the blockade tomorrow. “Fighting for the Swedish model becomes even more crucial when it involves such a large company as Tesla.” Negotiations are currently at a standstill. IF Metall spokesperson Jesper Pettersson told WIRED that there are no ongoing talks with Tesla as of Wednesday.

Tesla didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Some unions that joined the blockade are expanding their actions in an effort to be more effective. Since November 7, union members working at four Swedish ports have been refusing to unload Tesla cargo. Tomorrow, the blockade will be extended to all ports in Sweden. “We don’t want to unload any Tesla cars,” says Jimmy Åsberg, who is president of the dockworkers’ branch of Sweden’s transport union and works at Gävle port. “We are going to allow every other car [to dock], but the Tesla cars, they will stay on the ship.”

He hopes Tesla will understand how important this issue is for workers in the country. “Not just dockworkers but for all workers in Sweden.”


The Swedish Building Maintenance Workers’ Union will also join the Tesla blockade on Friday at 12 pm local time, “simply because the [IF] Metall Workers Trade Union asked us to,” says ombudsman Torbjörn Jonsson, adding that the union has around 50 members who clean Tesla locations. Four showrooms and service centers will be affected—three around Stockholm and one in the city of Umeå. “Their workshops and showrooms will not be cleaned.”


Three days later, on November 20, the Seko union, which represents postal workers, will stop delivering letters, spare parts, and pallets to all of Tesla’s addresses in Sweden. “Tesla is trying to gain competitive advantages by giving the workers worse wages and conditions than they would have with a collective agreement,” said Seko’s union president, Gabriella Lavecchia, in a statement. “It is of course completely unacceptable.”

It’s unclear what impact the strike and blockade are having on Tesla operations in Sweden, which is the company’s fifth-largest market in Europe. Local Swedish media report that new Teslas are being unloaded in Danish ports and driven over the border, a claim WIRED was not able to verify.

The last time Swedish unions faced off against an international company over working conditions was when toy company Toys R Us also refused to negotiate a collective agreement in 1995. After a three-month strike that started with retail employees and spread to boycotts by other unions, the company eventually signed.

Stefan Löfven, the country’s former prime minister, said he’ll refuse to take a taxi if the driver is behind the wheel of a Tesla. “It should be obvious for a company to follow the customs that exist in the countries where it operates, but it looks like Tesla has planned to ignore the Swedish labor market model,” he said on Facebook. “Shame on you Tesla.”

 

[bnew]

At Tesla, Swedish Workers Can Do What American Workers Can’t

Today on TAP: In support of striking mechanics, dockworkers there are no longer unloading Teslas. Such solidarity isn’t legal here.

prospect.org

At Tesla, Swedish Workers Can Do What American Workers Can’t​

Today on TAP: In support of striking mechanics, dockworkers there are no longer unloading Teslas. Such solidarity isn’t legal here.

BY HAROLD MEYERSON


NOVEMBER 14, 2023






Expand

JOHAN NILSSON/TT NEWS AGENCY VIA AP

The ship Malacca Highway is moored at the port of Malmo, Sweden, as port workers block the unloading of vehicles from Tesla, November 7, 2023.

Even as the UAW is planning organizing campaigns at the non-union factories of Toyota, Honda, and Tesla, an organizing campaign among Tesla mechanics in Sweden illustrates one path to successful organizing that American workers used to take until conservatives closed it off.

Tesla has no factories in Sweden, but it does employ around 120 mechanics to tune up and fix their cars. The union of such workers, IF Metall, has been trying for years to get Tesla to the bargaining table, as is the norm in Sweden, where roughly 90 percent of the workforce is represented by unions. The very idea is anathema, of course, to Elon Musk, who believes such matters at the company, and perhaps in the world at large, are best left to Elon Musk. After Musk responded with a flat No to recognize the union, the mechanics walked off the job on October 27 and remain on strike.

What followed illustrates nicely what it means when a nation has solidaristic values reinforced by solidaristic laws. A few days into the strike, the union of Swedish dockworkers announced it would no longer unload Teslas at the nation’s ports. (The Teslas sold in Sweden are shipped in from German and U.S. Tesla factories.) Then, the painters’ union joined in and vowed that its members would no longer do paint jobs on any Teslas in need of a touch-up. Now, the Communications Employees vows not to make deliveries to Tesla’s offices if Tesla doesn’t recognize its mechanics union by November 20.
More from Harold Meyerson

These are not actions that U.S. unions could undertake in support of a UAW strike at Tesla. During the great period of union growth in the U.S., however—roughly 1936 through 1947—such “solidarity strikes” were legal and not uncommon. With the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, they were seen, and codified, as a necessary way to build worker power in a capitalist nation where undue power by managers and shareholders was the default condition of economic relations—a condition that had contributed to a catastrophic global depression in the early 1930s.

With the enactment (over President Truman’s veto) of the Taft-Hartley Act by a Congress dominated by Republicans and right-wing Southern Democrats in 1947, however, secondary strikes and boycotts by workers in support of striking workers at a different company or in a different sector were outlawed. At the time, unions represented roughly one-third of the American workforce, but under Taft-Hartley, their rise was abruptly halted and within a decade began its 60-plus-year decline to its current 10 percent level (just 6 percent in the private sector). That puts the share of unionized workers about where it was before the NLRA legalized workers’ right to bargain in the mid-’30s.

Since the mid-1960s, every time the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, they’ve tried to pass labor law reform bills that would have restored to workers some of the rights and much of the power they lost with Taft-Hartley’s enactment. Democrats have never been able to surmount the Senate’s supermajority hurdle, however. With public support and the Biden administration behind them, and with a new crew of militant leaders at some key unions, labor is now waging its most serious offensive in many decades.

For the movement to grow as it did before Taft-Hartley, however, would still require major changes in the legal landscape. Most Democratic elected officials finally seem to understand that; it’s been the work of decades, and taken the defection of growing portions of the working class from party ranks, to get them there. Now that they’re there, labor needs more of them in public office to put Taft-Hartley out of its misery, thereby lifting much of the working class out of its misery, too.

 

[Luke Cage]

Elon Musk is an idiot.

seems to antagonize the very groups that would be they much receptive to his products. He wants to be conservative despite himself.

Conservatives worship the oil lobbies and are anti green energy
Conservatives are anti union and don't care about the workers that work in manufacturing industries.

 

[bnew]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxmjd/your-turn-united-auto-workers-launches-campaign-to-unionize-tesla

'Your Turn': United Auto Workers Launches Campaign to Unionize Tesla​

After the UAW won contracts with the Big Three, it's seeking to unionize 150,000 workers across a dozen companies including Tesla.

By Jules Roscoe
November 29, 2023, 4:03pm

VCG / CONTRIBUTOR VIA GETTY IMAGES

The United Auto Workers plans to unionize a dozen U.S. and foreign automakers, including Tesla Motors, in an organizing campaign encompassing “thousands” of workers, the union stated in an announcement on Wednesday. The campaign follows the UAW’s successful strike in its contract negotiations with Big Three automakers over the last months, in which workers won raises of up to 33 percent.

“To all the autoworkers out there working without the benefits of a union, now it’s your turn,” said UAW president Shawn Fain in a video released on Wednesday. “Go to uaw.org/join. The money is there. The time is right. And the answer is simple. You don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck. You don’t have to worry about how you’re going to pay your rent or feed your family while the company makes billions. A better life is out there.” The release stated that thousands of non-union workers were already signing union pledge cards on the website.

The companies that the union plans to organize include Mercedes Benz, Toyota, and Tesla, as well as other companies in the EV sector. After the UAW strike concluded, Toyota and other manufacturers raised their wages by around 10 percent, which Fain called the “UAW bump.”

Workers at Tesla in the U.S. are not unionized, though some facilities have made initial efforts towards organizing and faced retaliation for doing so. They had thus far not been affected by the strike.

However, Tesla repair technicians in Sweden went on strike earlier this month after Elon Musk refused to meet and bargain with their union. German automotive sectoral unions have also been working to unionize Tesla's gigafactory in the country, and won workers a four percent pay raise after holding informational events about unionization in the factory. Labor experts told Motherboard at the time that the surge of Tesla labor organizing in Europe, combined with the UAW’s success in the U.S., could open doorways for U.S. Tesla workers to organize.

Do you work at Tesla? Do you know more about this union drive? We’d love to hear from you. From a non-work device, you can contact Jules Roscoe at jules.roscoe@vice.com or on Signal at (415) 763-7705 for more security.

“Unions are organized on an international level,” said Branislav Rugani, the international confederal secretary for French trade union Force Ouvrière, in a phone call to Motherboard at the time. “They talk amongst themselves. When they return to their respective countries, they organize on a local level.”

The UAW’s drive is expected to cover almost 150,000 auto workers across “at least thirteen” companies, the union’s press release stated. It named as targets the German automakers Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMW; the Asian automakers Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, Subaru, and Mazda; and the EV automakers Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid.

 

[Cryptocurrency Scarface]

Elon Musk is an idiot.

seems to antagonize the very groups that would be they much receptive to his products. He wants to be conservative despite himself.

Conservatives worship the oil lobbies and are anti green energy
Conservatives are anti union and don't care about the workers that work in manufacturing industries.

He’s going to start a new line of Tesla petrol to appease neocons

That’s my 2024 prediction

 

[Stir Fry]

Goodglover.gif

 

[3rdWorld]

The hype is over

 

[bnew]

Tesla Shipments to Sweden Are Under Threat Across the Nordics

Tesla Inc.’s deliveries to Sweden are at risk of being blocked from across the Nordic region after unions asked their neighboring peers to bolster their weeks-long strike.

www.bloomberg.com

Tesla Shipments to Sweden Are Under Threat Across the Nordics​

• Danish workers refuse to transport company’s EVs to Sweden
• Elon Musk has described the labor dispute as ‘insane’
  

A banner from IF Metall union reading "We Demand a Collective Agreement" during a labor protest outside the Tesla Inc. service center in Segeltorp, Sweden, on Dec. 5.Photographer: Erik Flyg/Bloomberg

By Christian Wienberg and Jonas Ekblom
December 5, 2023 at 3:15 AM EST
Updated on
December 5, 2023 at 6:59 AM EST


Tesla Inc.’s deliveries to Sweden are at risk of being blocked from across the Nordic region after unions asked their neighboring peers to bolster their weeks-long strike.

Harbor workers and drivers at the Danish union 3F will stop offloading and transporting Tesla cars to Sweden in about two weeks, according to a statement issued Tuesday. This will prevent Tesla from circumventing a blockade by Swedish dockworkers who’ve halted shipments by sea.

A banner from IF Metall union reading “We Demand a Collective Agreement” outside the Tesla Inc. service center in Segeltorp, Sweden, on Dec. 5.Photographer: Erik Flyg/Bloomberg

In Finland, the Transport Workers’ Union will meet on Thursday to decide how it will respond to Swedish unions asking Nordic peers to join in sympathy actions, a spokeswoman said by phone. Norway’s United Federation of Trade Unions is monitoring the situation, spokesman John Trygve Tollefsen said.

Tesla has for more than a month been locked in a dispute with Swedish labor groups after the carmaker repeatedly refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement with the union IF Metall. The strike has spread through sympathy actions, stopping the delivery of mail to Tesla as well as trash pickups. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has called the Swedish labor action “insane.”

“Even if you are one of the richest people in the world, you can’t just make your own rules,” Jan Villadsen, the chairman of the 3F union’s transport division, said in the statement. “We have some agreements on the labor market in the Nordics, and you have to comply with them if you want to do business here.”

Read More: How Musk’s Anti-Union Stance Faces Test in Sweden: QuickTake

Sweden is Tesla’s fifth-biggest European market, and signing any agreement with the Swedish unions would set a precedent for the company. Tesla has vehemently opposed unionization efforts in other countries where it operates. Yet collective bargaining agreements are standard practice in Sweden, covering around 90% of all working Swedes.

Tesla's Imports to Sweden Jump​

Carmaker will roughly double shipments this year

K20192020202120222023 YTD

Source: Mobility Sweden

Note: 2023 data is for January through November

Tesla has been fighting back in Sweden, filing two lawsuits to limit the conflict’s impact after the delivery of license plates to its new vehicles stopped. In the first, it won a temporary injunction granting it the right to take delivery of license plates directly from the transport agency’s supplier.

In the second case, a Swedish court is expected to rule on an injunction this week on whether the postal service needs to deliver the plates that are currently stuck in the post.

IF Metall sent an official request for sympathy action to Nordic transport unions last week, after extensive discussions by the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union with counterparts across the region, spokeswoman Elin Lornbo said by phone on Tuesday.

“We have a very deep relationship with them and encouraged them to initiate blockades at ports in their respective countries since it is an effective and permitted form of sympathy action,” she said.

Should all the Nordic transport unions join the blockade, the main route open to Tesla for imports would be by truck from Germany. That’s at least a five-hour drive, one way, with each truck able to transport a handful vehicles.

Sympathy action by trade unions is an accepted part of the Scandinavian labor market, and cross-border strikes are not unheard of. In 2015, Sweden-based pilots joined a walk-out of Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA’s Norway-based pilots.

“Solidarity is the cornerstone of the trade union movement and extends across national borders,” Villadsen from the Danish union said. “The Swedish workers are currently fighting an incredibly important battle.”

— With assistance from Craig Trudell

(Updates with potential Nordic action throughout.)