Sweden's Tesla Strike Has US Unions Taking Notes

Originally published in Bloomberg Businessweek on April 29, 2024 as “Tesla Strike Has US Unions Taking Notes”

It was still dark in Malmö, a coastal city in southern Sweden, when the union men arrived early one winter morning. They filed into a trailer parked on the roadside, donned yellow vests and stepped back out into the cold. A short distance away, a few people hurried across the icy street, wearing parkas imprinted with a familiar name: TESLA. The groups exchanged awkward glances, like neighbors passing in a stairwell. Then the second set shuffled into a low-slung auto repair shop, while the unionists huddled together and sipped coffee as the sun rose. Another day in the first-ever strike targeting Tesla Inc. and its chief executive officer, Elon Musk, was underway.

Tesla technicians with IF Metall, one of Scandinavia’s biggest blue-collar labor unions, have been off the job in the automaker’s 10 Swedish workshops since October. The central issue is Tesla’s refusal to sign a collective agreement—a written accord common in Scandinavia that sets out wages, working hours, leave policies and the like. Seen in isolation, it’s a small fight. Fewer than 50 employees are on strike, in a country that makes up just 1% of Tesla’s worldwide sales. But as Tesla embarks on its largest-ever round of global layoffs and US unions seek inspiration for their own organizing campaigns, both sides are acting as though what happens in Sweden could have global implications.

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Reported with Anders Melin. Illustration by Shira Inbar.