2023-11-25 07:50:00
(CNN) — It’s taken almost a month, but workers striking against Tesla in Sweden have finally gotten a response from the company’s anti-union boss. “This is crazy”, said CEO Elon Musk on Thursday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter of which he owns.
Musk was thus responding to the news that Swedish postal workers are refusing to hand out Tesla license plates, joining a wave of actions in sympathy with mechanics who stopped repairing Tesla cars at the end of last month.
About 130 mechanics began their strike in October after their employer, a Tesla subsidiary in Sweden, announced it would not recognize their union, according to CNN affiliate Expressen.
The strike soon spread to dockers, who began blocking deliveries of Tesla cars at the country’s ports, to electricians, who stopped performing maintenance tasks for the car maker, and to other workers in Sweden, Expressen reported. .
“This is about good wages, good pensions and good insurance for all our members working at Tesla,” the Swedish union IF Metall, which called the original strike, said on its website.
“We have been negotiating with Tesla for a long time. They have refused to sign a (collective) agreement and violate basic principles of the Swedish labor market.”
The country’s workforce is heavily unionized, with about nine in 10 workers covered by collective bargaining agreements.
A union official takes part in a strike outside the Tesla Service Center in Segeltorp, Sweden, on October 27.
What happens to Tesla workers in other countries?
But unionization at Tesla has resulted difficult. At least three attempts by its American workers to unionize have failed, mainly as a result of the company’s aggressive tactics and weak labor protections in the United States.
The National Labor Relations Board, a US federal agency, has repeatedly sued Tesla and Musk for illegal or improper anti-union activities, such as questioning employees and disciplining or otherwise discriminating against workers because they support unions.
This year, the automaker fired more than 30 supporters of a nascent union at its Buffalo, New York, facility just days after the organizing effort was announced.
Musk, the world’s richest man, has also expressed his opposition to unions and drew the ire of the labor relations agency when he ordered him to delete a 2018 tweet that suggested Tesla employees would lose their stock options if they formed a union. labor union.
Still, strikes by Swedish workers may embolden Tesla employees in Germany, where it has a large electric vehicle and battery cell manufacturing plant.
German unions have pressured the company to apply a collective agreement to its 11,000 workers at the factory near Berlin, according to Archyde.com.
IG Metall, a powerful German union, claims that Tesla pays its workers less than other automakers in Germany and gets rid of employees who get sick too often. More than 1,000 factory workers joined the union during a day of protest last month.
At the beginning of the year, Tesla submitted an application to double the production capacity of the plant – located about 30 kilometers from the German capital – to one million electric vehicles.
If the expansion goes ahead, the factory will overtake Volkswagen’s sprawling plant in the German city of Wolfsburg, snatching away the crown of Europe’s largest car factory.
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