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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

Aggressive American union busting tactics don't go down well in Europe. This isn't the first time this type of thing has happened.

Walmart famously crashed and burned in Germany, for example, because they treated the German unions like uppity communists.

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Exactly. This is about our entire model under threat. And it will be Tesla's Afghanistan. Membership in unions is the norm in Sweden. People want to be in unions. I want to be in my union. We feel good about them and employers (who respect our model) feel good about it too because it is cooperative.

For many reasons, the US has a model which is not cooperative but built on bitter enmity. This is repeated throughout the nation with e.g. cars vs bikes.

We do not have that here. This is Musk bringing all his prejudice to a bunch of countries he doesn't understand the norms and culture of.

>> don't go down well in Europe.

> Exactly. This is about our entire model under threat. And it will be Tesla's Afghanistan. Membership in unions is the norm in Sweden.

Unionization rates differ significantly across European countries. While the unionization rate in the Sweden is quite high at 65.2% (as of 2019), it is much lower in Germany at 16.3% and even lower in France at 8.9%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1356735/labor-unions-mos...

I was specifically speaking about the Nordic Model of which I am a member and a citizen. I could have been more clear but by "my" I meant as a citizen of a country participating in the Nordic Model. What the rest of Europe does is up to them. Unions are foundational to our (Scandinavia's) way of life. This fight ends with Tesla either agreeing to our model or losing our entire market.

To put into context, Tesla only employs 120 people in Sweden.

There are enough other social norms that US companies can bloody their nose on in other European countries.

As for strikes in particular: France doesn't require a union vote to engage in a strike to do so with far-reaching protections (2 employees fighting for an employment-related change seem to suffice from my cursory reading), so the French can strike without needing to be unionized. And boy, do they strike...

The French system is not at all like the Nordic system. It is much closer to the American system, only with stronger unions.

The Swedish almost never go on strikes, with very few exceptions.

> Aggressive American union busting tactics don't go down well in Europe.

But... Tesla never even got that far. They just hired some people who apparently wanted the jobs? No one got fired or threatened, no bribes are alleged. It really seems like IF Metall fired first, no?

Tesla has refused to negotiate for over 5 years.

With who though? Not their workers. Can you cite coverage of the "union busting" activities you're talking about?

https://archive.is/gXGSn

There is nothing remotely like "union busting" alleged in that article (which is quite good, and largely supports my belief that this is an unreasonable escalation by Swedish labor; so much so that I maybe question if you actually read it?).

I linked to it because I thought you may not be familiar with this dispute.

I'm puzzled. Do you think when he flew in workers from other countries that this was not a strikebreaking tactic or are you saying that this did not happen?

Unreasonable may be in the eye of the beholder. It is however completely expected. If anything, they waited much longer than usual.

This is pretty much a school book example how labor conflicts go.

The next steps of the conflict are also expected and known well in advance. The only problem is that nobody seems to be willing to inform their higher ups at Tesla what is happening.

The union? I didn't respond on the busting part, just that Tesla refused to negotiate for 5 years. But from what I read Tesla brought in workers from elsewhere, does that count as union busting?

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