License plates are becoming scarce
Tesla sues Swedish logistics company
November 28, 2023, 9:10 p.m
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In Sweden, the IF Metall union wants to enforce a collective agreement at Tesla. So far, the electrical engineer has been stonewalling. In solidarity, freight forwarders, port workers and postmen in Sweden joined the strike. This has consequences for a logistics company.
The electric car manufacturer Tesla has filed a lawsuit against the Swedish logistics company Postnord because its employees no longer deliver license plates to the car company. The responsible Solna district court announced that the postal company now had three days to comment. Only then can the lawsuit be examined.
The background to the dispute is a strike in the Swedish Tesla workshops that has been going on for weeks. The IF Metall union is demanding a collective agreement from Tesla for its members, which the US car manufacturer rejects. That’s why employees in the Swedish Tesla workshops have been on strike since the end of October. Since then, other professional groups have joined the strike in solidarity, including freight forwarders, dock workers and postmen. That’s why Tesla is now running out of license plates.
Tesla boss Elon Musk recently commented for the first time about the strikes against his company in Sweden. Musk wrote on
The automaker also filed a lawsuit on Monday against the Swedish Transport Authority because, according to Tesla, it was failing in its duty to provide license plates. This in turn is solely due to the Postnord strike. The responsible district court in Norrköping decided on Monday that the authority was obliged to hand over the license plates. The licensing authority is currently trying to find a solution to this. The Swedish news agency TT quoted a judge responsible as saying that it could take several weeks until a final decision is made in the dispute over the license plates.
In response to the call from IF-Metall, around 130 employees in ten Tesla workshops in Sweden stopped work at the end of October. Since then the strike has expanded. This was followed in November by 470 workers in workshops where cars from different manufacturers are repaired, as well as workers in four ports who blocked the loading of Tesla vehicles. Tesla boss Musk has repeatedly rejected calls for workers to unionize. Around 127,000 people work for the electric car manufacturer worldwide.