Striking Swedish workers getting under Elon Musk’s skin

By Oleysa Dmitracova | CNN

It has taken practically a month, however employees putting in opposition to Tesla in Sweden have lastly drawn a response from the corporate’s famously anti-union boss. “That is insane,” CEO Elon Musk said Thursday on X, the platform previously often called Twitter that he owns.

Musk was responding to information that Swedish postal employees are refusing to ship Tesla license plates, becoming a member of a wave of motion in sympathy with mechanics who stopped servicing Tesla automobiles late final month.

About 130 mechanics started their ongoing strike in October after their employer, a Tesla subsidiary in Sweden, introduced that it might not acknowledge their labor union, in accordance with Expressen, a CNN affiliate.

The commercial motion quickly unfold to dockworkers who began blocking deliveries of Tesla automobiles on the nation’s ports, to electricians who stopped upkeep work for the carmaker, and different employees in Sweden, Expressen reported.

“That is about good wages, good pensions and good insurance coverage for all our members who work at Tesla,” Sweden’s IF Metall union, which known as the unique strike, said on its web site.

“We now have been negotiating with Tesla for a very long time. They’ve refused to signal a collective (bargaining) settlement and violate primary rules within the Swedish labor market.”

The nation’s workforce is closely unionized, with round 9 out of 10 employees lined by collective agreements.

However unionizing at Tesla has confirmed difficult. No less than three makes an attempt by its US employees to arrange have failed, primarily as a consequence of aggressive techniques by the corporate and weak protections for labor in the USA.

The Nationwide Labor Relations Board, a US federal company, has repeatedly known as out Tesla and Musk for unlawful or improper anti-union actions, resembling interrogating workers, and disciplining or in any other case discriminating in opposition to employees as a result of they assist unions.

This yr the carmaker fired greater than 30 supporters of a nascent union at its facility in Buffalo, New York, simply days after the organizing effort was announced.

Musk, the world’s richest man, has additionally been vocal about his opposition to unions and triggered the ire of the labor relations company when it directed him to delete a 2018 tweet that hinted Tesla workers would lose their inventory choices in the event that they fashioned a union.

Nonetheless, the strikes by Swedish employees could embolden Tesla’s workers in Germany, the place it has a large plant manufacturing electrical autos and battery cells.