One year on, we know this: Sweden's trade unions are more than a match for Elon Musk

The US presidential election has not been the only high-stakes date looming for Elon Musk. It has been more than a year since Swedish workers came out on strike against his electric car giant Tesla. Swedish industrial union IF Metall has been demanding better wages, benefits and conditions for mechanics in Tesla repair shops across the country, but fundamentally what is at stake is the Swedish labour market model of collective bargaining which Musk refuses to recognise.

It is the first and only strike against Tesla anywhere in the world. And it has now become the longest-running strike in Sweden for a century. In April, six months into the dispute, Musk said: “Actually, I think the storm has passed on that front, I think things are in reasonably good shape in Sweden.” That was not true then, and it is not true now.
The past year has been marked by a wave of solidarity strikes by other unions to block the shipping of Tesla cars to Swedish ports, halt the cleaning of Tesla facilities, withhold postal deliveries, including new number plates, to all Tesla offices and prevent Tesla charging stations being connected to the power grid. Tesla has repeatedly lost legal battles against these solidarity strikes, and was recently forced to pay SEK6.5m (£468,000) in legal costs to the Swedish postal service, PostNord.

Twelve Swedish trade unions are involved and three Nordic ones, including Norway’s transport union Fellesforbundet and 3F Transport in Denmark. Meanwhile, Tesla has brought in strikebreakers from the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Denmark and many other European countries to cover the 52 striking workers, almost half of Tesla’s mechanics in the country.