A week ago that was Sweden. Now it's the Nordics. Let this marinate through Christmas, and it may find home in European legislatures.
Swedish labor laws are actually fairly lax (depends on what you compare with ofc), where the state has handed over essentially legislative power to the "parties", the large union organisations and organisations of employers / companies. A little corporatistic if you want.
These parties then negotiate and the resulting CBA's fills in blanks in the legislation (such as minimum salary levels etc) and other benefits. With a CBA in place, strikes are forbidden if the deal is kept. It's renegotiated every couple of years. Many companies / local unions also have local amendments (which are negotiated on a more local level).
This model is generally appreciated by both the unions and large enterprisey companies. It gives stability to the companies.
However... Tesla is of course not part of these employer organisations. A typical software startup or even fairly large (< ≈1000) white-collar employers are not part of these organisations either. About 10% of workers are outside of CBA (like me and probably the majority of developers in Stockholm). Those companies don't value having to commit to a CBA, might have different compensation schemes etc. The workers at these companies are typically happy and well compensated. It's not uncommon to see stuff like "Our pensions are according to the CBA" even if they don't sign the CBA.
Employees of these non-CBAcompanies can still be in the union though, as you get benefits even without CBA, and part of the unemployment insurance is typically through the union.
Further, according to both Swedish labour law and EU negative freedom of association principles, entering into a CBA is not required.
But, the whole Swedish model depends on most employers signing the CBA, especially those in blue collar industries where the risk of exploitation is higher. No union is going to strike about e.g McKinsey not having a CBA, but Tesla mechanics I think are too close to home of the blue collar unions.
I do wonder how this will end... Tesla signing an CBA seems out of the question, and I think the union might have overplayed their hand here. Many Tesla employees are not striking (nor want a CBA), many Tesla customers who might have had a good impression of the unions were pissed of when the union put a strike on e.g changing to winter tires of Tesla cars (even at non-tesla shops).
No, but there's a unique alignment between labor (which is popular with voters) and industry (which fears Tesla) that could create real political momentum. This is a dumb alignment to force. Tesla is doing it.
Anyone know if the german Tesla factory is unionized?
Considering IF Metall started the current strike after trying to get deal signed for six years, I guess IG Metall will be still reporting "progress" out to 2030...
Next year there are new elections for it.
They might be worried that if they go down this route then they get set on a path to become their outdated competitors.
They petrified when they became inflexible. Adaptability, not orthodoxy, is how challengers win.
To be clear, I don't think we'll see some pan-European labour movement against Tesla. But I do think it's becoming increasingly lucrative to take pot shots at the firm. If that starts happening in EU capitals, that's twenty-eight needless distractions to dispatch.
The countries without a sea connection, or energy pipelines to such a country are having harder time getting energy. Mostly German automotive firms and their supply chain have factories and those usually have some unionization, though truly not as strong as in the Nordics, and the workers can indeed be paid with lower wages without inducing discontent.
But the striking Swedish Tesla workers aren't working in production, they're working in services. So even if Teslas would be made in Romania or Bulgaria, you still need to service them in Sweden, you won't send them to Bulgaria for service.
>of course lacking infrastructure would make it harder
What infrastructure is lacking? Poland, Czechia and especially Romania are already quite big auto manufacturing hubs.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585024/leading-car-autom...
Edit: That statistic only shows number of cars coming out the assembly lines but the automotive sector is way bigger than that. There's also OEM suppliers and parts manufacturing, including SW, that also contribute to the auto sector.
There must be some reason Tesla decided to build their massive factory in Germany?
The same reason cheaper cars are made in lower-cost countries and premium cars in high cost countries, and Tesla is still a premium car.
Tesla went to Germany because it has the best infrastructure for automotive and they're making premium cars and can afford the higher costs of building in Germany as time to market was more important for them to gain market share than reducing costs. Cost reduction comes at a later stage.
But that doesn't mean Eastern EU countries have bad infrastructure, otherwise nobody would build cars there.
If we want EVs to get cheaper to rival those from China, then either those German workers will have to accept lower wages, or the EVs will have to be made in lower labor countries. There's no free lunch.
But we still agree that they have worse infrastructure and that lower labor costs and no pesky unions didn’t seem to offset that in Tesla’s case.
> If we want EVs to get cheaper to rival those from China,
Higher tariffs would also be a perfectly reasonable solution.
Because, like I already said, Tesla had to enter the EU swinging to quickly maximize market share. And since its vehicles are all premium anyway, it could afford the higher cost of German manufacturing, but as the EV race heats up in the future moving into the lower cost segment, I'll bet you factories in the East will happen otherwise you can't have cheap EVs.
>Higher tariffs would also be a perfectly reasonable solution.
Do you want an EV future or not? Because as long as EVs stay more expensive in the EU, the average joe will keep buying ICEs, and EU EV industry will fall behind the Chinese one anyway making them uncompetitive exports. The EU car makers need to haul ass on the EV side kicking and screaming otherwise tariffs won't save them forever from going bust.
Sure, you can put tariffs on Chinese imports and tariffs already exist, but then the Chinese will do in the EU, what the Japanese did in the US: build local factories in low wage areas to build affordable cars, and still undercut the local competition.
Not at the cost of the European car industry.
> Because as long as EVs stay more expensive in the EU, the average joe will keep buying ICEs
Why would tariffs affect EV prices disproportionately more than that of ICE cars?
> US: build local factories in low wage areas to build affordable cars, and still undercut the local competition.
Which is IMHO probably thr best outcome. You’d have actual competition driving prices down but Chinese manufacturers wouldn’t have unfair advantages like when they are allowed to import cars from China.
Also US has much higher tariffs than thE EU. So I don’t think they are necessarily hurting electrification that much.
This might be the one move stupider than starting this fight, an innovator's dilemma [1] own goal.
The Nordics are a high-income EV beachhead. Tesla has best-selling cars. This entire fight is currently intrigue. The risk is it metastasising into a political crisis. What makes that crisis a crisis is it threatens those sales. Decamping--in effect, surrendering--positively nukes them.
In Hungary when driving along the Budapest-Wien railway I can often see trains full of cars on some stations waiting for their timeslot (passenger trains have priority over freight in Europe).
Why? What does it have to do with the “innovators dilemma”?
Beachhead. You’re opening a beachhead for a competitor to start small with ample margins.
This is a pretty meaningless cumulative metric which considers things like "Legal obstacles to foreign labour", "ICT priority for government", "Graduates in science", "Schools connected to the internet", "Telecom revenue", "Nature of competitive advantage" and many other, some of which are pretty hard to measure [1]. I wouldn't count such a metric as a measure of "volume of innovation".
[1] https://www.innovendo.net/pdf/archiv/Global%20innovation%20i...
My point is that having these Union collective bargaining agreements doesn't impact innovation in either # of successful startups or just general country innovation metrics.
> Stockholm is surprisingly innovative
This is only when you do an intellectually dishonest trick of comparing Stockholm the city to american states capita-wise. If you compare Stockholm (0.8 unicorns per capita) to other large cities, it will lag behind NY (1.48 UpC), Boston (3.5), Austin (1.0), Denver (1.4) etc.
How?
30 in Stockholm, population of ~950,000 21 in Boston, population of ~650,000 7 in Denver, population of ~700,000 etc...
I was going off of government info [0] but if you manually check you'll find it still works out albeit unicorns change pretty often at the moment.
[0] https://start.stockholm/en/about-the-city-of-stockholm/how-t...
edit: Okay Boston might have 31 [1], but while you're comparing leading cities to Stockholm you still have the remainder of the US which brings innovation rankings down. My overall point that Sweden has a decent level of innovation & startups (per capita) while maintaining a much better standard of living still stands IMO.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/greater-boston-area-unicorn-s...
It would be strange to compare a capital of one country to the countryside of another.
And a solidarity strike in Austria, like in Sweden, would be incredibly unlikely as I don't think there's the legal framework for that in Austria, and in general, striking is not really part Austrian labor culture but more like bending over to wealthy industrialists donors to the conservative OVP party, which is why I put my money on France.
This is the situation at Tesla Sweden, which pays wages below the market average and tries to cover the gap with stock options which Tesla is free to rescind at any time. There is also a points-system that in practice requires unpaid overtime in order to get a raise.
Specifics such as salary, overtime, vacation etc are more tangible and with more direct impact on working conditions. But striking for a specific type of agreement, which ties conditions in one workplace to a broader context are a different matter. That is a more strategic play which is about who sets the rules and who has the power.