Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is more performative and/or grasping at straws, kinda like the recent X Corp v Media Matters suit.

Clearly performative IMO. The likely outcome is that the 100-odd employees Tesla have in Sweden are transferred to some other organization (with a union agreement) and Tesla proper just does not do business directly in Sweden.

Clearly performative?

The court just ordered the agency to hand over the license plates to Tesla within a week.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/domstol-teslas-registreri...

First, this will not be decided by the tingsrätt, second, the context is wider than this single issue. The “performative” is why doesn’t Tesla just sign a union agreement, that is performative.

> The “performative” is why doesn’t Tesla just sign a union agreement

Because very few (none?) employees working for Tesla are actually on strike. There are a lot of postal employees, dockworkers, etc on strike, but not many from Tesla.

It appears that the IF Metall wants Tesla to sign a collective agreement, but neither Tesla nor most (all?) of Tesla's employees want that. As far as I can ascertain, the union's only grievance against Tesla is that they do not have a collective bargaining agreement (not pay, not conditions).

IF Metall has gotten so little traction that they are offering even non-member Tesla employees 130% of normal pay to go on strike, and also publicly talking about sanctions against member employees who continue to show up to work.

> they are offering even non-member Tesla employees 130% of normal pay to go on strike

That's what all striking members get. The extra 30% is meant to make up for benefits lost during the strike (e.g. retirement fund contributions and vacation day accrual).

The "special" thing they've done is to waive the waiting period that normally applies to new members, so that workers who do agree with the strike can join without to much financial risk.

> talking about sanctions against member employees who continue to show up to work

The sanction is expulsion from the union. Strikebreaking weakens the strike and the union, so that makes perfect sense.

The court just ordered the transport agency to hand over the license plates to Tesla within a week.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/domstol-teslas-registreri...

For now. And why do you copy and paste this comment?

Have you seen this thread? So many branching conversations saying Tesla will lose. (They might eventually, but for now, they’re not.)

On the "what is the legal basis for..." I think Tesla is beginning a process to have their hinds (and stock price) protected. A businessman will not just raise his hands up in the air in despair and say "ok I will not proceed". No, he/Tesla is suing as they have every right to and if local/top Swedish court says "oops can't do anything" then they can easily escalate to a higher court (EU) will solve it for them. Meanwhile a higher court can slap Sweden with a beautiful fine i.e. "after 1/1/2025 you will be paying €1m per week until you resolve this.

There are many solutions to this problem, and Swedish post office being a sympathetic dick is not (imho) the right way.

Sounds like an extremely optimistic timeline for this suit to have gone through the Swedish administrative court, the Swedish administrative court of appeal, the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court, the EU legal system and have the EU legal system impose a penalty payment in 400 days.

If Tesla has to do this, I'm guessing their cars are not going to have license plates for quite some time.

Wrong. The longer it takes the better for Tesla because they just won an interim decision in court.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/domstol-teslas-registreri...

This was just one step on one issue. It sounds like Tesla may encounter many other turns and blockers in Sweden and neighbouring countries.

It's not the post office, it's its employees. Being a dick must be culture-dependent as I don't think many Swedes will consider someone being a dick for protecting their nation's social contract.

The EU doesn't have a say in this matter.

It will if they go to court, Tesla loses and escalates each time. After the supreme court of Sweden you can take things to the EU court.

You can take things to the EU courts only in specific cases. You have to find out if it's an applicable human rights issue (it isn't). You can try to get the European Commission interested (good luck with that). Etc. Even if an EU court examined the case and made a decision, Sweden wouldn't necessarily implement the judgement.

See e.g. https://commission.europa.eu/about-european-commission/conta...

>After the supreme court of Sweden you can take things to the EU court.

The EU doesn't have an appellate court; unless there's a question of interpretation of EU law (and that's for the court to decide, not parties to the case) there's no basis for making a referral.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com