Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency via AP
The ship Malacca Highway is moored at the port of Malmo, Sweden, as port workers block the unloading of vehicles from Tesla, November 7, 2023.
Even as the UAW is planning organizing campaigns at the non-union factories of Toyota, Honda, and Tesla, an organizing campaign among Tesla mechanics in Sweden illustrates one path to successful organizing that American workers used to take until conservatives closed it off.
Tesla has no factories in Sweden, but it does employ around 120 mechanics to tune up and fix their cars. The union of such workers, IF Metall, has been trying for years to get Tesla to the bargaining table, as is the norm in Sweden, where roughly 90 percent of the workforce is represented by unions. The very idea is anathema, of course, to Elon Musk, who believes such matters at the company, and perhaps in the world at large, are best left to Elon Musk. After Musk responded with a flat No to recognize the union, the mechanics walked off the job on October 27 and remain on strike.
What followed illustrates nicely what it means when a nation has solidaristic values reinforced by solidaristic laws. A few days into the strike, the union of Swedish dockworkers announced it would no longer unload Teslas at the nation’s ports. (The Teslas sold in Sweden are shipped in from German and U.S. Tesla factories.) Then, the painters’ union joined in and vowed that its members would no longer do paint jobs on any Teslas in need of a touch-up. Now, the Communications Employees vows not to make deliveries to Tesla’s offices if Tesla doesn’t recognize its mechanics union by November 20.
These are not actions that U.S. unions could undertake in support of a UAW strike at Tesla. During the great period of union growth in the U.S., however—roughly 1936 through 1947—such “solidarity strikes” were legal and not uncommon. With the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, they were seen, and codified, as a necessary way to build worker power in a capitalist nation where undue power by managers and shareholders was the default condition of economic relations—a condition that had contributed to a catastrophic global depression in the early 1930s.
With the enactment (over President Truman’s veto) of the Taft-Hartley Act by a Congress dominated by Republicans and right-wing Southern Democrats in 1947, however, secondary strikes and boycotts by workers in support of striking workers at a different company or in a different sector were outlawed. At the time, unions represented roughly one-third of the American workforce, but under Taft-Hartley, their rise was abruptly halted and within a decade began its 60-plus-year decline to its current 10 percent level (just 6 percent in the private sector). That puts the share of unionized workers about where it was before the NLRA legalized workers’ right to bargain in the mid-’30s.
Since the mid-1960s, every time the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, they’ve tried to pass labor law reform bills that would have restored to workers some of the rights and much of the power they lost with Taft-Hartley’s enactment. Democrats have never been able to surmount the Senate’s supermajority hurdle, however. With public support and the Biden administration behind them, and with a new crew of militant leaders at some key unions, labor is now waging its most serious offensive in many decades.
For the movement to grow as it did before Taft-Hartley, however, would still require major changes in the legal landscape. Most Democratic elected officials finally seem to understand that; it’s been the work of decades, and taken the defection of growing portions of the working class from party ranks, to get them there. Now that they’re there, labor needs more of them in public office to put Taft-Hartley out of its misery, thereby lifting much of the working class out of its misery, too.
