After 1,021 days, or almost three years, Sweden’s largest industrial union IF Metall is calling off its strike against Tesla. The reason is as appalling as it is bitter: the American EV maker bought out the remaining strikers one by one until there was nobody left to picket.
The public fight started on October 27, 2023, when roughly 120 Tesla mechanics across seven Swedish workshops walked off the job. Their demand was modest by Nordic standards: sign a ‘kollektivavtal’, the Swedish name for a sector-wide collective agreement that covers nearly 90 percent of all employees in the country and guarantees wages and working conditions.
Sympathy strikes
Tesla refused, and the dispute accelerated fast beyond the striking workers, as the ‘kollektivavtal’ is considered a national prerogative. Dockworkers refused to unload Teslas at Swedish ports.
PostNord stopped delivering the company’s license plates. Electricians halted charger maintenance. Painting companies stopped working on repairs. Moreover, sympathy strikes spread to Denmark, Norway, and Finland.
Despite this being the first strike in Tesla’s 20-year history, the carmaker responded stubbornly and moved around the blockades. It imported cars through Germany and trucked them north to Trelleborg.
It went to court to secure plates directly rather than through the post. The company didn’t move an inch toward signing the collective agreement. The strike lingered into the longest workers’ opposition witnessed in Sweden and Europe.
Not in a hundred years
By the end, approximately 80 IF Metall members were still holding the line. But then, Tesla paid them to leave. Effectively, no compromise was reached.
“Tesla has gigantic economic resources and has used them, among other things, to buy out the strikers. (…) We haven’t witnessed this in the past hundred years,” said contract secretary at Swedish Trade Union Confederation LO Veli-Pekka Säikkälä in an official press release.
Säikkälä’s disappointment finds support among fellow union representatives. IF Metall’s contract secretary Simon Petersson: “Tesla is so opposed to collective agreements that they would rather buy out union members than offer secure conditions.”
No damage done
However, the LO states that it will not end its pursuit to have the ‘kollektivavtal’ signed. It even refers to a renewed strike as a means of making it happen, even though this now seems to have taken on a symbolic turn, as writing out checks succeeds in quelling the opposition.
But the most awkward part is that the standoff never actually hurt Tesla’s business in Sweden. In 2024, the year the strike was at full force, Tesla registered its best year in the country. Workers at other companies sympathized with the strike, but customers didn’t seem to care.
A template for Germany?
The question now is whether this emboldens Tesla to take the same hard line in Germany, where IG Metall has been circling the Grünheide factory for years. Tesla’s German works council elections have already delivered repeated blows to the union, with independent non-union lists securing outright majorities.
It’s not difficult to see why Tesla’s victory is cumbersome. The Swedish labor model relies on nearly universal collective agreement coverage. Tesla just proved that a determined foreign employer with deep pockets can treat that model as an optional extra.
