Nordic unions rise up against Tesla over corporate culture clash

[Celerity]

Having been hit by a wave of strikes, Elon Musk’s company stands accused of failing to understand the Scandinavian culture of industrial relations

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/teslas-battle-with-nordic-trade-unions-alarms-investors-dsx7hjn8j

https://archive.is/GecLU



Some of the largest investors in the Nordic countries have challenged Tesla over their “deep concern” about the electric carmaker’s intractable conflict with Sweden’s trade unions, which has led to a series of rolling strikes across the region. Since Swedish mechanics downed tools at the end of October, unions in Denmark, Finland and Norway have joined in a wave of co-ordinated industrial action that threatens to derail the American company’s trade across the region.

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and the world’s richest person, has denounced the strikes as “insane”. Yet Sweden’s powerful unions argue that Musk and Tesla have failed to respect a national code of labour practices that have held an almost sacred status in the country since 1938. “We have been trying to negotiate with [Tesla] for over five years to sign a collective agreement,” Jesper Pettersson of IF Metall, which represents Tesla workers in Sweden, said. “The vast majority of workplaces of this size and dignity in Sweden have an agreement.”

At its core the dispute is a collision between Musk’s notorious disregard for unions, which he recently claimed “create a lords and peasants sort of thing”, and Scandinavia’s hallowed grand bargain between labour and capital. Eighty-five years ago, representatives from Sweden’s workers and employers met at Saltsjobaden, a bathing resort in the Stockholm archipelago, to hammer out a deal under which they would negotiate on pay and working conditions without the government involving itself.

The “spirit of Saltsjobaden” has proven remarkably durable. Over the last decade Sweden recorded only 2.4 days of strike action per thousand workers, compared with 18 in the UK and 128 in France. Yet this apparently immovable object is now confronted with a previously irresistible force. As Tesla expands into Europe it has run into a far more entrenched culture of labour organisation than it was accustomed to encountering in the US. At its vast “gigafactory” facility east of Berlin, which generates about two thirds of Tesla’s European sales, the manufacturer has repeatedly clashed with IG Metall, the continent’s largest union.

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