(More generally, postal services in the EU tend to be structured as businesses these days, because they are in direct competition with various courier and package delivery services.)
Also, while the employees may be on strike, managers who rank high enough are not represented. If a company has particularly important obligations it needs to honor, it can always tell the managers to handle them personally.
You have to get very high in the hierarchy before you find a manager that the unions will not represent. This is one of the major problems with the Nordic model I would say.
I'd say it's a key factor to why it can sustain at all.
Compare to tech startups and big tech where I imagine the majority of those who would be able to drive a union are already intertwined enough in leadership that they feel prevented from organizing due to conflict of interest.
In any case, this also probably breaches EU law related to universal postal service, which states that mail must be delivered to every address 5 days a week.
""The universal service obligation (USO) is the core of the Postal Services Directive (97/67/EC, amended by Directives 2002/39/EC and 2008/6/EC). This is the requirement that letters and parcels should be delivered to each home or business premises, on 5 days each week, throughout each EU country (with exemptions)."
Tesla has a right to postal service in the same way as everyone else.
https://da.se/2023/11/totalstopp-for-nya-telsabilar-far-elon...
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_majeure
"Med force majeure avses vanligen krig, upplopp, brand, naturkatastrofer (som översvämning, orkan, jordbävning), explosioner, strejk, nya lagar som förbjuder fullföljandet av avtalet, och liknande."
I'll assume you read Swedish since you seem to be an expert at the issue. If not, you can plug these into a translator yourself.
"Force majeure typically refers to war, riots, fire, natural disasters (such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes), explosions, strikes, new laws prohibiting the fulfillment of the contract, and similar events."
The thing is though, Tesla isn't suing because their license plates aren't being delivered. They are suing because it was* literally impossible for them to access an essential government service.
(* was, because Tesla has won a preliminary decision forcing the state to allow Tesla to arange an alternative delivery method - probably Tesla sending someone around to the factory to pick up the plates)
In my opinion Force Majeure would only be a valid defence if it was the number plate factory workers who went on strike, but that's not what happened. The number plates are there, ready to go, and the state refused to allow Tesla to access them.
Force Majeure is not a blanket blanket right to do whatever you want. It only defends you in cases where you had no reasonable alternative available due to the strike.
I'm reminded of a time when flooding closed a railway line that I'd bought tickets for... the railway company didn't argue force majeure and cancel everyone's booking. They hired a dozen busses. You have an obligation to find a reasonable solution if the service you'd normally provide isn't possible.
In my case, the train service was 100% aware that they had a low bridge over a river that floods whenever there is heavy rain and therefore they couldn't argue that it was an unforeseen event. They would have been liable, not only for the cost of the train ticket, but also for any other damages/etc suffered by someone who was suddenly unable to get where they needed to go (booking a flight or regular bus wasn't possible, those don't have enough spare capacity for an entire train full of people). In this case, there is a perfectly reasonable and zero cost alternative to having license plates delivered by their usual method, and they can't refuse to use that alternative.
You know how to find your way for that from Wikipedia, I assume. From PostNord:
https://nitter.net/PostNordSverige/status/172767223321924818...
https://nitter.net/PostNordSverige/status/172773029292270847...
Making unions a "Force majeure" basically gives them the ability to smite as if they were gods.
European states have recently developed this annoying habit of "protecting" the rights of citizens, but then leaving loopholes that render the protections null and void. By recently, I mean since the early 20th century. The Weimar Republic is the poster child of that.
Also, the reference has more to do with European laws being crafted with such exceptions, not whether they apply to natural persons or corporations.
That's like the entire point. They're so effective lots of places ban them which like... take that for what it's worth.
In this case, they are violating consensuality. The Tesla workers don't want the collective agreement. The sympathy strikers are outsiders to the Tesla employee pool who are imposing the collective agreement on them.
Given this incident, I can understand why these are banned. It seems to have more to do with a political power play than it does worker's rights.
maybe should follow their own whim
What stops them from quitting at any time, or not working for him to begin with?
* Is there any place for government to have labor laws at all? Because that argument applies to everything from pay, nondiscrimination, and safety.
* Do you not see unions as a market force? Government generally does more to hinder unions than support them and the laws on the books in most countries are there so naive owners who didn't read their history don't do go and get themselves dragged out of their office by an angry mob.
- a service (collection from access points and delivery) on 5 working days a week (with exceptions);
- the collection, sorting, transport and delivery of postal items weighing up to 10 kg;
- services for registered and insured items." [1]
That being said, obviously the specific number of days is not important here.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/postal-se...
That would be a public business?
>>> its employees have the same right to strike as any other private sector employees.
A business owned by the state is part of the public sector, not the private sector. This isn't a question of whether shares of its stock are traded on a public exchange. Companies with publicly-listed stock are still private companies in this sense.
[1]: https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...
So pulling out entirely is a much more realistic option for a car company than a restaurant, and as a result the car company has more leverage and both sides know it. And they can pretty much hold out indefinitely because in the meantime they can just make the cars somewhere else, the same as they would forever if they left.
It's not obvious what the unions have to hold over them when "stop making things in that country" is a completely viable alternative for the company which might have been nothing more than a coin flip even before this.
Sympathy strikes might spread to the other Nordic countries and maybe even Germany, where they are already fighting IG Metall. Then the federation of Nordic transport unions have proclaimed their support for IF Metall, so Tesla might be unable to get anything shipped in these countries.
Or they could just sign the agreement that sets basic minimum requirements which supposedly they already exceed.
So why don't they stop having those and let independent shops do it? Repairs used to be a major profit center for traditional dealerships but electric cars are supposed to cut that way back, right?
> They cannot hire other companies to perform something for them, no electricians to repair charging stations, no cleaning services, cannot source any parts for cars there, etc.
Why does this bear such a strong resemblance to organized crime?
Can you imagine if corporations could do this? You get into a disagreement with Microsoft and can't do business with any company that uses Windows anymore?
I kind of hope they find a way around it just to fight back against the unreasonableness of it.
> Or they could just sign the agreement that sets basic minimum requirements which supposedly they already exceed.
"If once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane."
It's obvious that the reason both sides care about this is the precedent it sets rather than any specific details of what they're negotiating over today.
American companies also has a pretty strong resemblance to organized crime.
What do you believe is so unreasonable in the collective agreement? Supposedly Tesla already exceeds the minimum bar it sets.
More than 90% of workers in Sweden have a collective agreement. This isn't the first time that an American company ran into the Swedish system, they've set the precedent multiple times already, this isn't going to be any different.
Worker unions are a lot better at making the voices of workers heard and actuated on.
Tesla is required by law to use the post to get plates. This invalidates the whole premise.
If Tesla agreed (like 99,9999% of companies) with the democratically designed collective agreement, there would be no targeted strike. Strikes are one of the main democratic bargaining tool employees and unions have... including on key point of businesses.
But, more importantly, PostNord isn't doing anything - it's a unionised group of workers refusing to deliver Tesla products. That's how strikes work, and Musk's go-to course of action is to immediately proceed to legal action rather than negotiating and meeting the union's requirements.
How does a private company get the benefits of being legally required? That seems like a benefit that only a public company should have.
Then why in this case are they violating consensuality and trying to impose the collective agreement on the Tesla worker pool from outside?
It effectively creates a powerful voice of literally everyday people who are working.
Solidarity strikes is the real power of worker unions.
Then why don't they have the backs of the majority of Tesla workers who didn't want the agreement? Are some workers more equal than others?
Are the "independent groups" you're talking about the very connected Unions?