Costly in terms of eventually being forced to choose between allowing unionization and leaving the nordic market entirely.
It's something that just about every other big anti-union American company have had to deal with and it's in the past always led to the American company basically surrendering and allowed unionization usually without any major loss of profit/revenue, apart from the money wasted fighting the strong and very popular Scandinavian trade unions.
Yup, not aware of any US company that would have exited nordics because of unions. Nordics are politically very integrated societies and large scale actors are all perceived to ”play on the same side” including unions etc. So Tesla is not just taking on the unions, they are challenging the entire social contract by proxy.
Which is a number that makes it worse... it means they're only popular in at most 4 countries, and have stiff competition (or in general unappealing to buyers) everywhere else.
If they were selling like hotcakes more equally around the world, a place with only 10% of US sales would not be in their top 5.
It's something that just about every other big anti-union American company have had to deal with and it's in the past always led to the American company basically surrendering and allowed unionization usually without any major loss of profit/revenue, apart from the money wasted fighting the strong and very popular Scandinavian trade unions.