Swedish union declares strike for Tesla employees
ifmetall.se
ifmetall.se
For instance, Sweden does not have a legal minimum wage - this is all done by collective agreements. Nine out of ten employees work under a collective agreement.
Can you expand here?
(many) European unions are collaborative with their employers and act like they fundamentally want to help the business grow so there's more to share. American unions, even when they are not outright corrupt mafia-eque organizations (ie, longshoresmen), are purely extractive.
It's OK to think that this is a good thing but this is not the same as a collaborative relationship, like you would have with coworkers or another team at a (non-dysfunctional) company.
Of course, it would be preposterous for workers to be elevating the needs of management over their own needs. After all, no one is looking out for them but them.
> They are attempting to extract as much as the labor market can support.
And what, precisely, do you think companies are doing?
In Europe it is often the case that companies and unions have a genuinely collaborative relationship where the unions will take the company's needs into consideration, and the company will take the worker's needs into consideration. It doesn't always work out, and each party has their own priorities of course. But it is often not nearly so adversarial as it is in the US. That it is like this is to a large extent a cultural peculiarity of the US rather than an immutable truth.
IF people (incl. those representing companies) were economically rational beings out to maximise their own short-term gain then that would be what would happen. But real people are not, and are often able to see that it creates a poorer, lower-trust society overall if they try to push for their immediate material needs too strongly.
This is of course all backed up by the legal and political systems (which will step in if either side oversteps the mark too far), and a long history in which these norms were established.
US unions can extract short-term benefits if the workers can hop to a comparable employer easily when the employer collapses. If workers in the EU are bound to an employer for 20 years, you need a long time-view.
Meanwhile you read about "All transit workers in <EU Country>" going on strike and causing widespread chaos (because no one else can get to work either) every 6 months or so. Usually, but not always, France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Romanian_teachers%27_stri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_German_public_transport_s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_French_pension_reform_unr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_French_labor_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_French_pensi...
Sure, I'll agree that our union system is not great, but I place the blame for this situation on employers.
a) Years at job = pay. Absolutely no pay increase or decrease for working harder or being better than average.
b) You are near impossible to fire unless you do something really dumb (caught watching porn at work multiple times, punch someone). You can be far below average and kinda sorta do your factory job and keep it for life.
Both are 1000000% against every fiber in my being, and would make me 100% never want to work at this kind of union. This is how like the autoworker and Police and teachers unions work.
There is no reason say a programmer union couldn't exist with different tools. And it could totally allow merit based pay and all of that. So by absolutely no means do I say that all unions are bad. I just know the standard American Union does not get along with my life goals.
IE - if you accept "work the least possible" as an individual, you yourself will do poorly. If the organization is forced to accept it, it will decline against other domestic competitors. If the country is forced to accept it, it will decline against international competitors.
In the US the biggest group complaining about lazy union employees are the other union employees.
What, where? In Sweden it's definitely not easy to get rid of workers. If you're doing layoffs rather than firing an individual you can't even pick and choose who to fire, you need to follow LIFO.
You're allowed to have a "trial period" for new employees though, during which it's easy to fire them.
Privileged Americans will do anything to steal labour and instead make the hard working people seem like the criminal. But the managers who steal money are completely safe and never accused by the privileged.
Only one of the reasons why unions are essential in US.
Rewards are distributed based off of seniority. If you do more than what’s “expected”, there’s no guarantee it will lead to promotion. It’s more likely that you’ll just be given more work
I agree with you when you say that hard work is good for people, but doing this for your employer (as opposed to for FOSS or personal learning) will just screw you over in the long run
In the union mindset, there's no chance to do better - it's all been traded away for the chance to do "no worse than" which by definition benefits the less good/productive and hurts the best people.
This is part of the problem. If you work hard but don’t benefit, you’ve essentially fucked yourself because then you’ll get assigned more, you’ll be stuck carrying a bunch of people. Even if you factor in comp increases, how do you know there’s a net benefit to working hard? (specifically for your employer, on your own time is a different story)
It isn’t blind “probability”, it essentially turns into this little psychological game where management dangles promotions in front of people to manipulate them into doing more than is needed
> coupled with a good employee's ability to move to an employer that values someone like them.
Hasn’t aged well in the current job market
Ok so on a personal level, if this happened to me, my sequence of response would be (1) talk to my management to fix the situation (2) failing that, look for another place to work (3) failing that, dial down my level of engagement.
Right now, #3 is the worst case. With a union, #3 is the default case since the system is designed to prevent you from being rewarded.
Unions don't dictate your pay, they set a range and the company pays in that range for performance. It's no different than what your employer does to you today, except with a Union the ranges are known and negotiated collectively instead of the company dictating them.
Unions don't prevent people from being fired, they just require cause. Because the flip side of this is corporate firing people without cause days before the qualify for 401k matching, pension plan, or another stock vest or other such nonsense. You want to fire Bob because you don't like him? Tough luck, we're not here to be friends, we're here to work. Union says show evidence Bob isn't doing his job, then you can fire him.
To a certain extent, this is an explicit goal of unions. Where "working harder" means things like "unpaid overtime" and "taking shortcuts that risk your safety" we consider that a good thing.
Where "working harder" means "actually doing your job" we consider that a bad thing. Of course working 16 hours a day used to mean "actually doing your job" so there's considerable grey area here.
A specific job title would have a wage tied to the agreement, that increased based on years in the title and other negotiated increases. There were absolutely performance bonuses... as per the agreement, not at the whim of management.
Management gets to set a wide scope of performance requirements, and those he cannot meet them lose their jobs.
What I do see is that unions do a good job at preventing arbitrary abuses by management... and management really hates that.
*per friends who still work there
Furthermore, just look here in California to multiple successful white-collar unions: the WGA (writers), the DGA (directors), and SAG (actors). If you're bad at your job or people don't like to work with you, you won't get hired, yet meanwhile, the unions guarantee everything from health insurance to minimum pay to pension to residuals and therefore allow much greater mobility between studios, jobs, and shows.
It’s already like this
> b) You are near impossible to fire unless you do something really dumb (caught watching porn at work multiple times, punch someone). You can be far below average and kinda sorta do your factory job and keep it for life.
Good, the bullshit takes less time and leaves more time for foss or family life or whatever else
perhaps i can shed some light. our union helps us negotiate for health insurance, dental, life insurance and a 401k contribution from our employer. in the first year we had it, we negotiated other things too. we de-gendered our shop floor bathrooms, made the company replace burned out overhead lights and exit sign "stickers" with real, light up exit signs. we made sure the break room was well lit (formerly all the lights were burned out) and there was a way to get our money back from the vending machines which were basicaly one armed bandits. we changed the way our facilities maintenance teams work to make sure they put down warning signs if theyve mopped and made sure the bathrooms got serviced once a day. we made a 2 year plan to provide functional safety guards on all the older equipment (met and done in 8 months by our awesome machine shop!) and finally fix the parking lot lights so employees felt safe going home on second shift.
these changes were also affected to non-union employees, mostly as a hold-the-line tactic to keep them from ever unionizing, but in the long run the company had to spend significant amounts of money on things that were traditionally deemed "non-essential" like toilet paper or exit signs.
Blanket statements require more explanation than this.
Why do you think that? I'm fairly certain this is incorrect.
AFAIK, North American unions are not generally company specific. They are trade specific in most cases, and in the case of auto-workers it's mostly the UWA.
Depending on the place, its not even always company-wide votes. For instance, there was a push for a few Amazon warehouses to join a union. If those votes had passed, it would have been the workers at that location then represented by the union.
And on top of that, its often only particular jobs that would fall under that union, not all jobs at that facility. That's why the auto companies are doing other layoffs these days, as there are other jobs at the factories that are not a part of the United Auto Workers and are not a part of the strike, but depend on the union workers working for their jobs to not pile up outputs or have no incoming tasks. Its not like all Ford or GM employees are a part of the United Auto Workers.
Having a strong union means that you can share their resources such as 100% of your wages being paid during a strike; a legal representative being provided for you by the union (for free).
Whenever you want, you can talk to your local union representative to inform you of your rights. And you may even choose, if you want, to have a union representative, i.e. a labor rights expert, present when you negotiate salary or resolve a conflict with your employer.
Everyone acts a lot nicer to each other when the power dynamic is balanced!
Of course, if another industry has better conditions, you can always vote with your feet. Competing for employees benefits the employees, in theory.
This is why I don't understand the "we can't find staff" thing. No, you can't afford staff, there's a difference. Offer me more money and a training program and I'll change my career. It's that simple.
> Of course, if another industry has better conditions, you can always vote with your feet. Competing for employees benefits the employees, in theory.
There's an interesting dynamic there though that you mention that a particular union may affect the employment conditions across a whole industry. So, theoretically an employer in an industry with a bad dominant union might be be hamstrung even if they wish to improve employment conditions but the core issues stem from a bad union (I'll note this question is from the perspective of an American, with limited and generally poor interactions with unions, who wishes things were better here).
Would enough people in Sweeden just not buy Teslas?
I don't doubt it is "tone-deaf" but I see that mentioned a lot and PR spats seem to result in very little.
I find it hard to gauge these kinds of things, lots of PR disasters are declared but I'm not sure many matter, even highly publicized gaffs don't seem to change much.
See e.g.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3cenlm/til_t...
Companies that are staunchly anti union everywhere else often capitulate in Sweden
did you know the nordic countries are among the happiest and have some of the strongest social benefits in the world while still being wealthy?
I do wonder how much of this is due to cultural homogeneity and the benefits that follow. Will this remain the case in the presence of a larger proportion of immigrants? I don't think its a fair comparison, when people contrast Nordic countries with the US.
Many studies have found that social trust is higher and easier to maintain in homogeneous societies.
Unions have whatever powers they've been allowed to have by the country they operate in, just as do corporations and police forces.
[0] Where you put the line between balancing the powers of unions vs. corporations is one of the major political dividing lines for the last 175 years, I'm not going to do it justice.
It's one thing to discourage people from engaging with a business because of their labour practices, it's another thing entirely to actively prevent them from doing so.
It's not like Tesla has a real customer presence that would be driven away or anything. It's not a restraunt.
To be clear I don’t mind if some group of people employs collective bargaining as a negotiation strategy, but the described behavior should be swiftly punished with fines, reparations and possibly light prison sentences. Alas, many unions are somehow above the law in matters of harassment.
Well no. They showed up and discouraged people from entering by generally being a nuisance and creating an uncomfortable atmosphere where you wouldn't feel like eating lunch. Had they physically blocked people from entering that would have been illegal.
The unions have very good lawyers that know exactly where the line between legal and illegal harassment is.
https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...
"Other people are using their own free will and self determination to undermine a CORPORATION!"
Cartel behavior requires coordination and collusion. If they are just following general social/business practices without having meetings about who to blacklist, then it doesn't meet most definitions.
Historically solidarity between workers is the reason why you only work 8 (instead of 16) hour days. Why workers have vacation days, sick pay, pensions and maternity leave etc.
Why? We don’t trust the state to do it better. Neither employees nor employers do.
The TL;DR of US labor law is:
1. Companies do [very illegal under local law, up to and including murder] things to bust unions; they buy off the local authorities to get away with this.
2. The Federal government adds specific protections for unions -- many of which don't exist in various European countries.
3. Companies complain that #2 makes unions too powerful, so the Federal government adds specific restrictions on unions -- many of which don't exist in various European countries.
I'm curious about the history in Europe, since an equilibrium seems to have been found without steps #2 and #3.
Also many unions did what business owners had done for centuries and went into politics. The social Democratic party in Sweden for example, is a part of the largest labour union. This is somewhat controversial in some circles, for sure, but changes the power dynamic for steps 2 and 3 a lot.
The thing about values is they only count when they're actually tested and have consequences.
Under GM management.
But if you list the causes of SAABs demise you get pretty far down the list before coming to "2 months vacation and 36 hour workdays" (it's 25 days and 39 hour work weeks btw).
¹) Yep, see dagw's sibling comment.
You're saying that a company that employees thousands of people should have died earlier and cost those folks their jobs because....it annoyed you personally?
There's a reason they ended up as a GM brand.
More socialist countries are inherently bad a creating and maintaining profitable businesses.
Your second sentence it a strawman. Of course it's not capitalism to bail out manufacturers. How's that working out for the US? All you've proven is that when the US implements socialist policies it's detrimental. So, thanks for proving my point.
Manufacturing does not work like software engineering. There is an extremely direct link between people showing up to the job and parts rolling off the line. The workers aren’t watching YouTube for half the day.
It is not as simple as you picture it.
Sounds like a net benefit for everyone, frankly
Let's say 1 worker works 40 hrs/week, but gets a day off every second week, i.e. 70 hrs/2weeks.
I need to hire a worker to keep productivity the same on that day off.
Now what if 9 other workers are staggered with their days off? My worker has a full time position (well, they need to have a day off too, but for the purpose of example.
"We need someone to work when people are off" being plugged by someone who is, implicitly, covering multiple people's days off keeps productivity exactly the same.
And if you make 100 widgets a day as a worker, you make 100 a day that you're working - we don't count your day off and say "Oh, you're only making 90/day now, worker productivity is lowered!"
There is no financial difference between paying someone to not work one day every two weeks, and having them show up that day but not do anything (which we can agree would be unproductive).
Paying someone to stay home, and then paying someone else to cover them, reduces productivity of the factory because it requires more total labor to produce the same number of parts.
You can argue that the person will be more refreshed or whatever, which I think is probably a good argument for many types of jobs that are not manufacturing line work.
People who have engineering or creative jobs constantly think that you can get the same work out of four days as five. And for their jobs, because they have significantly decreasing marginal productivity per hour worked, they might be right. But that's very different than line work. The 40th hour worked does not have appreciably different productivity than the 35th hour worked in a week on a line.
PTO is a "fringe benefit". Factoring it into productivity levels is orthogonal, as its goal is to increase desirability of the employer, not to ensure "maximum output per employee".
That's what I'm saying - productivity per employee doesn't change. They still make the same widgets/hour on the line on hour 1, hour 35 and hour 40 of their week. The company just employs 1.1 people to run that line full time (well, 40 hours a week, leaving aside 24/7 ops for the sake of simplicity) rather than the mathematical minimum 1 person.
> Paying someone to stay home, and then paying someone else to cover them, reduces productivity of the factory because it requires more total labor to produce the same number of parts.
Maybe it's the pedant in me as I approach an MBA program, but while there are multiple definitions of productivity, in industry it's usually an expression of the output as a factor of input. And generally it's the equipment that's the limitation. A factory whose equipment can produce 200,000 widgets/year can still only produce 200,000 widgets/year, even if you have twice as many employees working 20 hour weeks, i.e. productivity is the same.
"I work just as hard, I just don't work as much."
Solidarity is not yet dead it seems :)
They're in the "fuck around" phase, it's up to them if they'll find out.
Translated:
This is what the employees of tesla does not have compared to if they had a collective agreement:
- A complete insurance package with Fora
- The comprehensive adjustment support found in the main agreement between the social partners
- Salaries are lower compared to the average in the motor industry agreement
- Without the collective agreement no yearly raises are guaranteed
- No possibility of part time retirement
- They also do not have reduced working hours
Original:
Detta har inte de anställda på Tesla jämfört med om de hade kollektivavtal
- Ett komplett paket med försäkringar hos Fora
- Det omfattande omställningsstöd som finns i huvudavtalet mellan arbetsmarknadens parter
- Lönerna ligger lägre än genomsnittet i Motorbranschavtalet
- Utan kollektivavtal garanteras inte årliga löneökningar
- De har inte möjlighet till deltidspension
- De har inte heller arbetstidsförkortning
As many others have pointed out, these agreements are fundamental to the swedish labor market. While it's not as common in tech, industries like car manufacturing are almost completely covered.
https://www.ifmetall.se/globalassets/avdelningar/forbundskon...
I would guess hardly any employees will strike, because a collective agreement would probably not involve any stock options/RSU's at all.
For instance, Sweden does not have a minimum wage. Instead we have collective agreements which stipulate these issues.
If you install a reasonable minimum wage, it increases the freedom in the labor market by reducing the chains of collective agreements. It gives employees more options, flexibility, and power of self determination which can only be to their benefit.
The swedish model basically sets minimum wage by sector. Much more tailored to the employers and employees.
But this is the same argument for why there shouldn't be one at all.
One of the major problems with the minimum wage in the US is that it de facto destroys training programs for entry-level employees. You could go to a school and pay them money to be trained or go to Walmart and do unskilled labor for low wages.
But if you want to go to an employer and spend 40 hours there of which half is working and half is learning, what's the appropriate wage for that? You might very well should be paying them -- they're getting as yet still unskilled labor and you're getting qualified to do a job that would ultimately pay above-median wages that you might otherwise pay $30,000/year in tuition for. Taking that deal with them paying you $2/hour could be a bargain. But not if it's prohibited by law.
Meanwhile someone could then offer $2/hour for an ordinary job, but who is going to take them up on that for no countervailing benefit when other employers pay more? It's the same reason 98% of people are paid more than the existing minimum wage despite no legal requirement to do so.
"Collective agreements are the basis of the Swedish labour market model. This means that the trade unions and the employers' organizations determine the rules of the game in the labour market, without interference from the state and politicians. In Sweden, approximately nine out of ten workers are covered by collective agreements.
The terms of the collective agreement include wages, form of employment, occupational pension, working hours, vacations, and periods of notice. Thus, the employers benefit from industry-specific, long-term, and stable ground rules. "
It's hard to understand this. Why take the job if you don't like the pay? Taking the job at a certain wage and then striking seems the wrong way to go about things. Can anyone who knows the system explain this a little more?
With Universal Basic Income perhaps this could be avoided.
This is the point of unions!
I would expect this to be some justification or benefit present in the article.
They are like the large looking bouncer at the door of a club, who make patrons (businesses) behave themselves. So GP's coworkers are spoiled because the bouncer has been doing a pretty good job and seems unnecessary.
Edit: It does. Do a few job searches.
And history has shown that you get better outcomes not just for employees but the company and society as a whole. It's better these days but there is still a tendency to think of employees as mindless resources rather than assets.
I will add an anecdote to this post. I was talking with a close friend of mine’s father who owned a contruction company. I was fairly anti union at the time, and I made some comment about unions assuming he’d be anti union as well. His response was that he loved unions. He had 2 different unions onsite, and said they both provided access to the best workers. He was happy to have the unions for his business.
Now I realize that unions for him were acting like a filter, with the best construction workers likely being attracted to the higher pay and better conditions. But it was an interesting take on things for a young mind. I simply couldn’t fathom a world where a capitalist would embrace union activity.
With the collective agreement the workers would be provided:
- Complete package of insurance (providing workers with pensions, sick-pay, maternity leave)
- Re-education (if applicable, for instance companies cannot outright fire someone without severance. A re-education package can provide an employee with funds to acquire new skills so that they might be employed by another company)
- Wages in line with the industry standard (in Sweden)
- Guaranteed yearly wage increases
- Part-time pension plans (if applicable)
These are all afforded to other workers in the Auto industry.
This is leftists being leftists. I am not opposed to unions when they are needed, but this is trade unionism because trade unionism.
In Sweden nine out of ten employees work under a collective agreement. Are you saying some 90% of Swedish people are leftists?
Space X is an exception in my opinion and Space X + Musk articles usually don’t go down this path, at least not as often or as deep.