Norwegian unions threaten with Tesla boycot

e24.no

7 points·magicalhippo··8 comments

Do we think Tesla's objections to collective bargaining are cultural or practical? That is, do they just object on principle or do they feel it would be too harmful to their business?

Cultural. Many American companies think they can skip unions and/or collective bargaining when they come to Europe, and find out to their detriment that they can't.

Or they try to find as many loopholes in laws as they possibly can to avoid unions. See McDonald's in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_and_unions#German...

Considering how much of car manufacturing is done by union workers, I don’t think you can make a good argument that it is practical.

90% of Swedish workers belong to a trade union.

These are service workers. And very few want to join a union.

The Tesla workers in Sweden don't want to unionize. The majority of the ~120 employees in Sweden are ignoring the strike called by IF Metall and continuing to work. Only a handful are supporting the strike.

Elon Musk is known to fire people that support unions openly. I very much doubt they will tell the whole truth if asked, unless it is personally by a friend, not by a newspaper.

I am not sure what the term "boycott" means in this context, but it seems the thing has now escalated from Sweden to Denmark and is about to escalate also to Norway.

From the article, roughly translated:

Fellesforbundet is now announcing a boycott that will target the transport of cars to the Swedish market if the contractual relationship in Tesla AB is not in place by 20 December.

Fellesforbundet, literally "joint union", is the largest trade union in Norway in the private sector.

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