Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency via AP
A ship is moored at the port of Malmo, Sweden on November 7, 2023. Port workers there are blocking the loading and unloading of Tesla cars in sympathy with company mechanics who are on strike.
Electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla has been involved in an escalating dispute with IF Metall, the trade union representing its mechanics in Sweden. After several years of the union trying to get the company to sign a collective-bargaining agreement, the mechanics went on strike on October 27—and now Tesla is facing a full-blown campaign of sympathy strikes. Dockworkers are refusing to unload Tesla shipments, electricians will not repair Tesla chargers, cleaning companies will not service Tesla buildings, and now as of Monday, the Swedish postal union is refusing to deliver Tesla mail and packages.
As my colleague Harold Meyerson noted last week, these kind of strikes are largely illegal in the United States thanks to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (though the exact legal details, as usual in the American context, are hideously complicated). Carry out a sympathy strike in the States and you might be fired, see your union decertified, or even be sued for damages.
In theory, Tesla could just abandon the Swedish market, but it is quite large relative to its size—nearly 45 percent of auto sales there this year have been EVs, and the Tesla Model Y has been the best-selling vehicle by a big margin. So it’s worth examining the Tesla situation for some lessons.
This is far from the first time an arrogant foreign business, convinced that it can impose U.S.-style hyper-exploitative labor relations at will, has tangled with Nordic union power and been unceremoniously crushed. Probably the most famous previous example was when McDonald’s tried to bigfoot the Danish labor movement in the 1980s by refusing to sign any union contracts. As Matt Bruenig writes, after several years of failed negotiations, the unions gave up and called sympathy strikes in key industries connected to the company:
Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in them. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.
Workers also picketed McDonald’s stores across Denmark. Hey presto, a few months later the company gave in. That victory is why today, Denmark’s McDonald’s workers make a base hourly rate of about $20, with bonuses for overtime, night, or weekend work, and have an additional week of paid vacation on top of the legally mandated five weeks.
Obviously, that is great for workers. But it’s also worth pointing out that this model of labor relations involves far fewer strikes, labor disputes, or other business disruptions than the American union model. A wave of sympathy strikes imposes so much pain, so quickly, that companies essentially have no choice but to give up. Without that tool, American unions can only partially disrupt businesses depending on how many workers they have organized, and where. The recent United Auto Workers’ strike was brilliantly organized by their president, Shawn Fain, but it involved strategic selection of which plants to close down, gradual escalation, and careful husbanding of their strike fund. If UAW workers could have choked off the entire automotive industry at every point, from suppliers to factories to deliveries to sales, then the strike likely would have been over in a couple of weeks.
Incidentally, the U.S. prohibition on sympathy strikes makes a mockery of American “land of freedom” rhetoric. This is a straightforward restriction on the ability of unions to choose when and how to work, enforced by government coercion.
At any rate, as Bruenig notes, the relatively calm Nordic labor relations that I myself noted when visiting Finland recently are at bottom founded on labor power. Employers have been taught over many decades that it simply does not pay to try to extract maximum profits by squeezing one’s workers as hard as possible. Indeed, this is the first major strike in Sweden in many years.
That’s probably why both Tesla and the unions are taking this so seriously. Swedish unions see Tesla, correctly, as intending to undermine the established labor system in the extant auto industry. No doubt many Swedish employers in other sectors are watching this situation very carefully; if Elon Musk gets away with it, then they will surely try to copy his example.
On the other hand, if Swedish workers can bring the world’s richest man to heel with solidarity and collective action, then there’s no reason in theory why workers in other countries couldn’t do the same. It might take a lot longer in the U.S., but at the end of the day, without the brain and muscle of workers, not a single wheel can turn.
