Tesla employees in Sweden are threatening to go on strike for better pay as several unionization efforts are starting to put more pressure on the automaker.
For the most part, Tesla has managed to fend off major unionization efforts at its factories, but there seems to be renewed efforts to help Tesla workers have collective bargaining power lately.
Earlier this month, the IG Metall union claimed that 1,000 Tesla workers joined in an effort to ask for better working conditions at Gigafactory Berlin.
Now, Tesla is facing some issues in Sweden.
The metal workers’ union, IF Metall, claims to represent more than 120 Tesla employees who work in service centers in Sweden.
They are reportedly prepared to start a strike next Friday, according to local media reports:
The union is now threatening to order its members in all seven cities where Tesla operates service centres – or in total more than 120 employees – to walk out from the start of Friday next week.
IF Metall representative Veli-Pekka Säikkälä said in a statement that Tesla employees are asking for better salaries, pensions, and insurance:
This dispute concerns our members’ salaries, pensions and insurances. In a broader sense, it also concerns the rules of the entire Swedish labour market. Companies should not be able to gain competitive advantages by giving employees worse conditions than they would have with a collective agreement.
This is happening amid a brother effort to bring collective bargaining to tech workers in Sweden with employees of major Sweden-based companies, like Spotify and Klarna, launching unionization efforts lately.
While Tesla is an automaker, many see the firm more as a tech company.