Business | Swedish strikes

Elon Musk v labour unions: Sweden edition

Tesla faces a small but serious threat in Scandinavia

Cars charging at Tesla Superchargers at night. Gothenburg, Sweden.
Photograph: Alamy
|BERLIN

Elon Musk, boss of Tesla, has gone to great lengths to keep unions away from his electric-car maker’s 127,000 workers at its “gigafactories” in America, China and Europe. Even in Germany, land of harmonious relations between workers and bosses, the powerful metalworkers’ union, IG Metall, has no say at the company’s local plant in Grünheide, near Berlin. Mr Musk’s latest challenge—a strike by some 130 mechanics at ten Tesla service workshops in Sweden—looks like a trifle. But it may yet prove consequential.

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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Musk v unions”

From the December 2nd 2023 edition

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