[susano]

Not overly knowledgeable on Swedish law, but the idea that a public sector union can decide to block public services (in this case postal delivery of license plates) for a single company as a sympathy strike seems pretty nuts to me. Pretty sure Sweden would lose in European court at least (of course it would probably take a long time to percolate there).

[jltsiren]

PostNord is a private business owned by Sweden and Denmark. Unless there are specific laws to the contrary, its employees have the same right to strike as any other private sector employees.

(More generally, postal services in the EU tend to be structured as businesses these days, because they are in direct competition with various courier and package delivery services.)

Also, while the employees may be on strike, managers who rank high enough are not represented. If a company has particularly important obligations it needs to honor, it can always tell the managers to handle them personally.

[mytailorisrich]

Refusing to distribute mail to a specific recipient does not sound like a 'strike' in the sense of labour dispute to me. In France (often used a reference when it comes to striking...) that wouldn't be a legal strike, but obviously every jurisdiction is different.

In any case, this also probably breaches EU law related to universal postal service, which states that mail must be delivered to every address 5 days a week.

[Spivak]

This is what sympathy strikes are, if you're a unionized commercial bakery who delivers to a unionized restaurant that's currently striking you don't go and strike against your own boss. That's silly. You refuse to cross the picket line and deliver goods and services to the business who's striking so they have a harder time operating.

That's like the entire point. They're so effective lots of places ban them which like... take that for what it's worth.

[stcredzero]

They're so effective lots of places ban them which like... take that for what it's worth.

In this case, they are violating consensuality. The Tesla workers don't want the collective agreement. The sympathy strikers are outsiders to the Tesla employee pool who are imposing the collective agreement on them.

Given this incident, I can understand why these are banned. It seems to have more to do with a political power play than it does worker's rights.

[emj]

Well it is an ideological battle by a US company acting in an work environment very much unlike what the US has. I do hope the unions manage to keep this going for a year or two.

[tuukkah]

At least some Tesla workers do want the collective agreement (without it, they have little protection against the whims of Elon).

[AnthonyMouse]

> without it, they have little protection against the whims of Elon

What stops them from quitting at any time, or not working for him to begin with?

[adolph]

live by the whim, die by the whim

maybe should follow their own whim

[user_named]

There is no such EU law. Post is not delivered 5 days a week in Sweden.

[mytailorisrich]

"EU countries are obliged to guarantee a permanent, affordable, universal postal service everywhere within their territory, i.e. they have to guarantee as a minimum the following:

- a service (collection from access points and delivery) on 5 working days a week (with exceptions);

- the collection, sorting, transport and delivery of postal items weighing up to 10 kg;

- services for registered and insured items." [1]

That being said, obviously the specific number of days is not important here.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/postal-se...

[paulryanrogers]

Personal postage and large commercial shipments seem unrelated to me. Moreso if the former is via a government delivery service and the latter is via a private company.

[mytailorisrich]

To you perhaps, but not to universal postal service laws...

""The universal service obligation (USO) is the core of the Postal Services Directive (97/67/EC, amended by Directives 2002/39/EC and 2008/6/EC). This is the requirement that letters and parcels should be delivered to each home or business premises, on 5 days each week, throughout each EU country (with exemptions)."

Tesla has a right to postal service in the same way as everyone else.

[einr]

Force majeure trumps all obligations. There is no law being broken here.

[mytailorisrich]

What force majeure? Do you know what the term means?

[stcredzero]

Force majeure trumps all obligations.

Making unions a "Force majeure" basically gives them the ability to smite as if they were gods.

European states have recently developed this annoying habit of "protecting" the rights of citizens, but then leaving loopholes that render the protections null and void. By recently, I mean since the early 20th century. The Weimar Republic is the poster child of that.

[3np]

Did you read the reply to your previous duplicate comment before copy-pasting your now moot point in the current top thread?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38438450

[bjornsing]

> Also, while the employees may be on strike, managers who rank high enough are not represented. If a company has particularly important obligations it needs to honor, it can always tell the managers to handle them personally.

You have to get very high in the hierarchy before you find a manager that the unions will not represent. This is one of the major problems with the Nordic model I would say.

[Legogris]

> This is one of the major problems with the Nordic model I would say.

I'd say it's a key factor to why it can sustain at all.

Compare to tech startups and big tech where I imagine the majority of those who would be able to drive a union are already intertwined enough in leadership that they feel prevented from organizing due to conflict of interest.

[InCityDreams]

I'm not 'very high' at all (EU based, countries/rules differ). Just by title "Manager", I am not allowed by contract to join a Union. The Unions would represent me, but I voluntarily signed away that particular right. I do, though, thoroughly support the sympathy strikes: fuck you, tesla.

[thaumasiotes]

> PostNord is a private business owned by Sweden and Denmark.

That would be a public business?

[jltsiren]

PostNord a publicly owned company, but it's an ordinary company by its legal status. The latter is what matters for the legal rights of its employees. Because PostNord is in direct competition with privately owned businesses, it should operate under the same rules as its competitors. It could be seen as an unfair an possibly illegal advantage if its employees were not allowed to strike.

[user_named]

It's not publicly listed. It's private.

[thaumasiotes]

That is not the sense of the word "private" used by jltsiren:

>>> its employees have the same right to strike as any other private sector employees.

A business owned by the state is part of the public sector, not the private sector. This isn't a question of whether shares of its stock are traded on a public exchange. Companies with publicly-listed stock are still private companies in this sense.

[type0]

Why aren't Tesla suing PostNord instead?

[moogly]

Because the right to strike is written in the constitution. Postnord isn't really in the wrong here, but instead it's the Swedish DMV that has a questionable inflexibility of using something else than Postnord. The state is not supposed to partake, intentionally or not, in this "game of chess" between employers and unions.

[mxsjoberg]

they are suing both

[samcal]

This is just how labor unions roll in the Nordic countries. McDonalds learned this in Denmark [1]. The sooner Tesla realizes they need to negotiate labor contracts through the unions to operate in Sweden, the more money they can make.

[1]: https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...

[AnthonyMouse]

The two situations have an obvious difference. It's hard for McDonalds to sell Big Macs in a country without McDonalds restaurants in it. It's not hard for a car company to move production to a different country; that happens all the time.

So pulling out entirely is a much more realistic option for a car company than a restaurant, and as a result the car company has more leverage and both sides know it. And they can pretty much hold out indefinitely because in the meantime they can just make the cars somewhere else, the same as they would forever if they left.

It's not obvious what the unions have to hold over them when "stop making things in that country" is a completely viable alternative for the company which might have been nothing more than a coin flip even before this.

[Hikikomori]

Tesla doesn't make anything in Sweden. Their workforce is mostly mechanics working at car service centers. What the unions can do is make it very hard for Tesla to operate in Sweden. They cannot hire other companies to perform something for them, no electricians to repair charging stations, no cleaning services, cannot source any parts for cars there, etc. They can of course hire people directly to do these things and likely pay a premium to be able to attract people and get the things they need from other countries and use their own drivers to get that to Sweden.

Sympathy strikes might spread to the other Nordic countries and maybe even Germany, where they are already fighting IG Metall. Then the federation of Nordic transport unions have proclaimed their support for IF Metall, so Tesla might be unable to get anything shipped in these countries.

Or they could just sign the agreement that sets basic minimum requirements which supposedly they already exceed.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Their workforce is mostly mechanics working at car service centers.

So why don't they stop having those and let independent shops do it? Repairs used to be a major profit center for traditional dealerships but electric cars are supposed to cut that way back, right?

> They cannot hire other companies to perform something for them, no electricians to repair charging stations, no cleaning services, cannot source any parts for cars there, etc.

Why does this bear such a strong resemblance to organized crime?

Can you imagine if corporations could do this? You get into a disagreement with Microsoft and can't do business with any company that uses Windows anymore?

I kind of hope they find a way around it just to fight back against the unreasonableness of it.

> Or they could just sign the agreement that sets basic minimum requirements which supposedly they already exceed.

"If once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane."

It's obvious that the reason both sides care about this is the precedent it sets rather than any specific details of what they're negotiating over today.

[Hikikomori]

Tesla could do that. Nothing stops them from hiring someone else to provide this service, someone that has a collective agreement in place. This is the most likely outcome here as the other options are withdrawing from Sweden or signing the agreement.

American companies also has a pretty strong resemblance to organized crime.

What do you believe is so unreasonable in the collective agreement? Supposedly Tesla already exceeds the minimum bar it sets.

More than 90% of workers in Sweden have a collective agreement. This isn't the first time that an American company ran into the Swedish system, they've set the precedent multiple times already, this isn't going to be any different.

[aaomidi]

This is actually democracy in action.

Worker unions are a lot better at making the voices of workers heard and actuated on.

[letmevoteplease]

If a company is legally required to use PostNord and PostNord can legally refuse to deliver mail, it effectively gives PostNord the power to control any company that wants to continue receiving mail. Regardless of whether they are using that power for good or evil here, I don't think it's a power they should have.

[frosting1337]

Why not? They're a private company. Isn't that usually what Americans are telling people, that corporations are free to serve who they please?

But, more importantly, PostNord isn't doing anything - it's a unionised group of workers refusing to deliver Tesla products. That's how strikes work, and Musk's go-to course of action is to immediately proceed to legal action rather than negotiating and meeting the union's requirements.

[nomel]

> They're a private company.

How does a private company get the benefits of being legally required? That seems like a benefit that only a public company should have.

[philipwhiuk]

It's not really a private company. It's wholly owned by the government of Sweden and the government of Denmark.

[philipwhiuk]

It's not really a private company. It's wholly owned by the government of Sweden and the government of Denmark.

[einr]

Postnord as a company is not refusing anything. Some of the workers for Postnord are on strike.

[hayleox]

PostNord isn't refusing to do anything. Its employees are refusing to cross a picket line, and PostNord is unable to compel them to do so.

[david38]

Not sure you know what democracy is.

Tesla is required by law to use the post to get plates. This invalidates the whole premise.

[skitout]

Not sure you know what democracy is... Democracy is not just voting for your MP, it includes unions, strikes and collective agreement

If Tesla agreed (like 99,9999% of companies) with the democratically designed collective agreement, there would be no targeted strike. Strikes are one of the main democratic bargaining tool employees and unions have... including on key point of businesses.

[mxsjoberg]

> democratically designed collective agreement there is no such thing

[emj]

Lots of people work together and vote in their local unions, that then is taken into account when the the terms of a collective agreement is negotiated. That seems like the definition of democracy.

[cinntaile]

What is undemocratic about a law in a democratic country? They can pick up their plates themselves for now, the lawsuit will decide what the law says.

[okr]

Maybe being able to pick any other company to make the plates? For god sake, it is just a plate. A simple piece of metal with some letters on it to make everyone happy with traceability.

[cinntaile]

Government contracts need to fulfill very specific rules to prevent conflicts of interest. This one company one that bid and is now responsible for that. If you want it any other way, the law needs to be changed and that is again a democratic process.

[frosting1337]

You realise, of course, that if another company was able to deliver the plates, the same issue would still be occuring thanks to Swedish unions being in solidarity?

[sbuttgereit]

So gerrymandered districting exists as law in a democratic country, yet would you call that democratic?

[cinntaile]

I'm not following, no voting districts are being changed here? This lawsuit is about license plates that have a contractually decided upon producer and distributor.

[stcredzero]

Worker unions are a lot better at making the voices of workers heard and actuated on.

Then why in this case are they violating consensuality and trying to impose the collective agreement on the Tesla worker pool from outside?

[aaomidi]

Because workers having each others backs is actually a good thing?

It effectively creates a powerful voice of literally everyday people who are working.

Solidarity strikes is the real power of worker unions.

[stcredzero]

Because workers having each others backs is actually a good thing?

Then why don't they have the backs of the majority of Tesla workers who didn't want the agreement? Are some workers more equal than others?

[scottyah]

It screams corruption to me, this definitely sounds like one political group has infiltrated the governmental services and has gotten enough power to begin publicly target people/groups that they oppose.

[lock-the-spock]

I'm sorry but your claim does not make sense at all given the meaning of the words you are using

[scottyah]

I'm listening, what do you mean by that?

[hutzlibu]

Many different, independent groups voluntarily decided to support other workers in their fight for fair working conditions against an international megacorp, which is supported by their law. That is to me the literal opposite definition of corruption.

[scottyah]

Seems like one anti-Tesla (or EV in general, we can't tell from the article) group is leveraging their network of existing Union pacts and loopholes in the law to withhold license plates from waiting customers.

Are the "independent groups" you're talking about the very connected Unions?

[mxsjoberg]

yes, unions in sweden lean heavily towards one particular political party