Tesla - the people speak

Tech Talk EVs and Car Tech
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The Swedish workers wanted to form a union, because of the poor working conditions. They went on strike and Musk flew in strike breakers, which seems to have upset the whole country, which is now in support of the strikers and boycotting the Tesla factory - post isn’t being delivered, electricians refusing to carry out repairs etc.

Now he lost at court, again (2nd instance), he was trying to force the postal workers to deliver registration plates to the factory, the court sided with the postal workers. He is also trying to sue the government agency responsible for registration plates.

It all started in October, when 130 mechanics working for Tesal tried to get it to sign a labor agreement with them - the agreements usually hold minimum wages for different grades of workers, plus how much they get for each year of service and what benefits they should receive etc.

Since then, the strikes have spread, with workers outside of Tesla joining in, from electricians and postal workers delivering to the factory, to dock workers refusing to handle freight destined for the Tesla factors, to parts suppliers.

The solidarity has also spread to other countries in Scandanavia, such as Norway, Denmark and Finland. It is also not just other unions and workers that are standing behind the mechanics, some pension fund investors have announced that they are dropping all their Tesla holdings in response to how Tesla is handling its worker relations.

Unions in Scandanavia ensure good pay and conditions, even though there are no actual minimum wage laws. In Sweden, a majority of businesses are unionized.

Musk is openly against unions - he called the situation “total madness” on Twitter and has said that unions bring negativity and hostile relationships to the workplace. This might be true in America, but in much of Europe, it brings more harmony and better working conditions, meaning people are happier at work.

(From the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

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No doubt the spoilt manchild will take his ball away, not realising we never particularly wanted to play his game in the first place.

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I don’t think other organizations that are not involved in a dispute should be allowed to strike because of another organization. Especially like the postal system, assuming that it’s not private and is a government organization. You may like when it’s against someone that you don’t like, but that seems like it could become a rather large can of worms in the future.

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Are you unfamiliar with how unions work today? Crossing a picket line is considered bad form, and can get you labelled as a scab or a rat and they even use blow up "scabby the rat"s in some parts of the US to make this point.

The reason for these kinds of “adjacent actions” boils down to the fact that companies are not machines, they’re made of people, and those people can concordantly decide they dislike how others of their ilk (if not even in their own union) are being treated. This leads to a sympathy strike know as Solidarity action - Wikipedia .

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They aren’t striking, they are working as normal, except they are refusing to cross the picket lines to deliver mail, for example, or at the ports they refuse to process deliveries for Tesla. This is normal practice, as @PHolder says.

This is the solidarity that unions provide.

When the refuse workers strike or rail workers, for example, that is usually a one off strike and others don’t join in, although it can spread (a couple of years back the nurses and health workers striked and that went out to civil servants, refuse workers and, I think rail workers), but that was only after months of strikes with no progress on the part of the health worker unions.

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I know they do that (don’t think it’s a written regulation or a law that they have to), but you are saying all other industry unions are supposed to do that when there is a strike in one industry? That would be insane. So if the autoworkers strike, then the all other unions would stop working if there job effected whatever business the strike was towards.

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A union is of little value if people who support it don’t act in unison. I’m sure there are laws around what unions can and cannot do, but I think this is more of a concept of what the union represents. If you let one union fall for lack of solidarity, then you risk your own union falling by a divide and conquer approach taken by the actions of anti-union companies.

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