Tesla has won a small battle against Swedish unionists fighting for collective bargaining rights, but the war will continue.
A Swedish court ruled on Monday that the country’s transport authority must take its license plates from Tesla, which are being blocked by striking postal workers, or pay Aftonbladet the newspaper reported. Workers at PostNord, Sweden’s postal authority, had stopped the delivery of plates for Tesla’s new cars in an attempt to force Tesla to sign a collective labor agreement for engineers in the country.
The decision came within hours of Tesla filing a lawsuit against the Swedish Transport Agency and state-owned PostNord. Tesla said it sued the agency because the lack of access to license plates “constitutes an unlawful discriminatory attack directed at Tesla.”
In response to the expedited decision in Tesla’s favor, CEO Elon Musk posted on X thanking the country.
The decision is a blow to the Swedish labor movement, which relies on strong national support for collective bargaining agreements. More than 90% of employees they have collective bargaining rights and the system has led to a relatively peaceful industrial model with far fewer strikes than wage earners.
That starts to change with the addition of Tesla. The carmaker does not manufacture cars in Sweden, but has car service workshops there. In mid-November, Tesla rejected an appeal by 130 engineers in collective bargaining, so they prepared to strike. Other Swedish unions in different sectors walked out in solidarity. Mail and delivery workers, cleaners, car painters and dock workers have all refused to work with Tesla products and a Stockholm taxi company stopped buying new Teslas for her fleet.
PostNord workers joined the strike on November 20 and the transport agency refused to deliver the plates by other means because it was contractually bound to use PostNord.
Norrköping District Court said the agency must find a way to bring the plates to Tesla within seven days or pay a fine of 1 million Swedish kronor (~$96,000).
The district court, the transportation agency and Tesla could not immediately be reached for comment.
It is not the end of the fight in Sweden against Tesla. The IF Metall union struck mechanics on October 27 and is refusing to service Tesla cars after years of calls for Tesla to engage in collective bargaining have gone unanswered. Tesla is famously anti-union and has a policy of not signing collective bargaining agreements. The automaker says its employees have conditions as good as, if not better than, those demanded by IF Metall.
Meanwhile, in the US, the United Auto Workers union had gone on strike against Detroit’s big three automakers — Stellantis, Ford and General Motors — and recently reached an agreement at a significant cost to the automotive industry.
