- A record-length defeat: The 1,027-day walkout became Sweden’s longest labour dispute in a century and still produced no collective agreement.
- Borders that bind only unions: Tesla used the European Union’s Posted Workers Directive to bring in replacements from at least 14 countries, while unions remained bound by national frameworks.
- Norms without law: Sweden has no law or extension mechanism compelling an employer to sign an agreement, only norms that Musk was willing to break.
- Buyouts beat blockades: Confidential severance deals removed the strikers themselves, achieving what roughly 100 notices of industrial action could not.
- Conditions on green money: Social conditionalities, including collective agreements, must be written into the instruments that finance and regulate the green transition.
The historic Tesla strike ended on 19 August, after 1,027 days. On 27 October 2023, some 40 mechanics walked out of 10 workshops across Sweden. Nearly three years later, their union, IF Metall, has not achieved its goal: a collective agreement with Tesla’s Swedish subsidiary, TM Sweden.
The strike became the longest Swedish labour dispute in the past century and is the only strike ever called against Tesla anywhere in the world.
Tesla won a war of attrition, one of the scenarios I set out last year in my book on the conflict. Things looked promising at the outset, and support grew as the strike went on. At its height around 80 mechanics were out; polling showed a large majority of Swedes behind the union’s demand; and the reputations of Tesla and Elon Musk fell steadily in numerous polls both in Sweden and abroad.
A total of 14 unions from four countries joined sympathy strikes, a form of industrial action banned in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Roughly 100 notices of industrial action were issued, but Tesla circumvented or absorbed most of them. Unions halted postal deliveries, cleaning, waste collection, electrical work at workshops and charging stations, and the unloading of cars at Nordic ports.
Tesla also lost every legal action it brought, apart from one case still pending in the Supreme Court. It sued the postal operator PostNord, the Swedish Transport Agency, and the electricity network operators that refused to connect its charging stations to the grid.
But the company brazenly exploited gaps in the Swedish model. It used the European Union’s Posted Workers Directive to replace strikers with workers from its workshops in at least 14 European countries; it moved production of a safety component from a blocked Swedish factory to a manufacturing plant abroad; it shipped cars by lorry and passenger ferry when dockers blocked car carriers in all Nordic ports.
In the end, it was not enough. The world’s richest man, a supporter of Donald Trump and of far-right parties in Europe, prevailed. Tesla simply bought out most of the striking mechanics with severance deals carrying confidentiality clauses.
Left without strikers, IF Metall called off the strike.
Taking stock, we should note that the Swedish model’s sanctions still bite. A firm of Tesla’s size – around 400 employees – but with its production and suppliers in the country would have been at the negotiating table within weeks, or would never have faced a strike at all. In Sweden, collective bargaining coverage for blue-collar workers in firms of that size is 98 per cent, making Tesla an extreme outlier.
But multinational companies willing to absorb substantial financial and reputational costs can genuinely challenge Swedish unions.
Unlike many European countries, Sweden has no law or extension mechanism obliging an employer to sign or observe a collective agreement. There are only norms, which are widely respected. As we are painfully aware, people like Musk and Trump take pride in breaking norms.
But we should not mistake the Tesla dispute for an idiosyncratic Nordic affair. For one thing, Musk’s companies operate across the globe; for another, he is not only an anti-union employer but a political actor.
Before Germany’s 2025 federal election he endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), hosted its leader on his own platform, and expressed support for the far-right Restore Britain. Musk is clearly investing money, time, and other resources in political forces that would dismantle the institutions that democracy and unions depend on.
The Swedish model does not stand or fall with the Tesla strike, but we should not mince words: the outcome is bad, and not only for Sweden. If the strongest union movement in the world cannot obtain a collective agreement from Tesla, the question is where such an agreement could be won.
This should concern labour movements in every country where anti-union multinationals are competing for market share in the green and digital economy, where the jobs of the coming decades will be created.
Three conclusions can already be drawn from this historic dispute, some of them set out in a recent report I co-authored for the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI).
1. Organising and mobilising need to be prioritised. Unions sometimes take their own power for granted, especially if their membership numbers are high. But the Tesla case shows that, even in two highly unionised settings – Sweden and the German car industry – unions may not have the tools and techniques they need to maintain their membership, and that even a high unionisation rate does not guarantee that all members will actually join a strike (in the Swedish strike, roughly 40 per cent of members did not). While recruiting members is key, mobilising and activating them is equally important.
2. International sympathy action and EU rules need reassessment. Organising Tesla may be difficult given some of the ways that unions weigh the costs and benefits of campaigns, but these assessments can also change if other unions contribute funds or personnel, or help coordinate sympathy strikes and blockades. The limits are not always clear even in legal terms and can sometimes be the subject of court action to establish the boundaries for national and international solidarity action. Moreover, multinational companies can move labour, services, and capital across borders with little friction, while unions remain largely bound by national frameworks. Tesla moved strikebreakers using an EU directive, whose own text states that it does not "affect the right to negotiate, to conclude and enforce collective agreements, or to take collective action in accordance with national law and/or practice". Another underexplored institutional path to influence for workers, and possibly for trade unions, is the establishment of a European works council (EWC) at Tesla.
3. We need social conditions on public support. Policies to reduce carbon emissions are often viewed narrowly as industry and energy policies. The Tesla case illustrates what happens when policies are disconnected from the institutions that protect workers from the excesses of corporate profit-making strategies. It cannot be the state’s job to ease the path of companies that refuse to bargain or to improve social conditions. If the green transition is to be just, social conditionalities, including collective agreements, must be written into the instruments that finance and regulate it. Otherwise, we will build an ecologically sustainable economy that is socially unsustainable.
The strikers at Tesla fought on behalf of all of us and have earned their place as heroes in European labour history. Let us learn from their struggle so that others need not fight in vain.
