'Slippery slope' Workers defy anti-union Musk in Swedish Tesla strikes

‘I disagree with the idea of unions ,” Elon Musk said during a rambling onstage interview this week. “I just don’t like anything which creates a lords and peasants kind of thing.”

- Heather Stewart

Musk’s appearance at the New York Times event may be best remembered for his diatribe against X’s missing advertisers , but the anti-union outburst shed light on a clash taking place thousands of miles away in Sweden.

Musk’s electric car fi rm, Tesla, only employs about 120 workers in Sweden, servicing vehicles for Swedish drivers across several diff erent sites. Yet this small group of engineers is at the centre of a wave of industrial action, in which Swedish trade unions believe the very existence of the country’s long established model of harmonious labour relations is under threat.

Unlike in Britain, “sympathy strikes” are legal in Sweden. So the union representing the Tesla employees, IF Metall , has been backed by a string of boycotts and embargoes called in other industries – and encompassing far more workers than those at the centre of the dispute.

Dock workers are refusing to unload Tesla cars at Swedish ports; postal workers won’t deliver their number plates; electricians won’t service Tesla charging points.

Tesla is seeking to take legal action against some of these solidarity strikes, while fl atly refusing to budge on the unions’ central demand – that the company sign up to a collective agreement.

These agreements, often drawn up between employers’ associations and unions to cover entire sectors, are crucial to the way Sweden’s labour market has been governed for almost a century.

Unlike in many other European countries, there is no legally enforced minimum wage, and little statutory labour market regulation. Instead, the system is essentially voluntary – with the baseline for pay and other conditions, including pensions, set by collective agreements.