Forbes magazine regularly reports on the wealth of the richest people in the world. Elon Musk is #1, with assets of $250 billion. Despite his fortune, Musk despises unions.

In Europe, unions are taking action against Musk by refusing to deliver or service his Teslas.

The Washington Post reports:

MALMÖ, Sweden — Every day, port workers here in Sweden’s third-largest city unload shipping containers, oil, chemicals and building materials destined for places across the country. But there’s one thing they won’t touch: Tesla cars.

For six weeks, dockworkers at Swedish ports have refused to load or unload the electric cars made by billionaire Elon Musk. They’re part of a growing movement of workers across Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark who are protesting in support of striking Swedish Tesla technicians and their demand for a collective agreement on the terms of their employment.

“We’re going to take the fight all the way,” Curt Hansson, a 55-year-old dockworker here said in an interview during a break from unloading ships on a cold, gray December day. “Either he leaves or signs an agreement.”

Since October, when a subset of Tesla’s 130 technicians in Sweden first went on strike, tens of thousands of workers in Northern Europe have joined the largest coordinated labor action against Tesla since its founding in 2003. Norwegian and Finnish ports have likewise closed to Tesla shipments. Danish truck drivers won’t transport Teslas through their country. Postal workers have refused to deliver license plates to new Tesla drivers in Sweden, cleaners won’t work in the company’s Swedish offices and electricians won’t service its charging points here. On Friday, Swedish waste collectors added their support, refusing to pick up from Tesla’s repair shops across the country.

The solidarity blockades have the potential to disrupt Tesla sales in Northern Europe — a relatively small market compared with the United States and China, but a wealthy and environmentally conscious one, with some of the most electric vehicles per capita in the world. Even more, though, the labor actions are being watched as a test case for global efforts to crack Musk’s strict no-unions policy.

“Elon Musk isn’t making an agreement in Sweden because he’s afraid … it will create follow-ups in other countries, even the U.S.,” said Jan Villadsen, chairman of a Danish union that represents 50,000 transport workers, including truck drivers and dock workers blockading Teslas.

At Tesla’s super factory near Berlin, the company’s second production hub outside the United States, a growing number of the roughly 11,000 workers want to organize, German union officials say. And the United Auto Workers, fresh off its victory in strikes against Ford, General Motors and Chrysler-owner Stellantis, has said Tesla would be one of its next organizing targets.

“If Tesla gives in to the unions around this ongoing dispute, it could create a growing brush fire in Europe that eventually gets to the UAW and U.S. in 2024,” said Dan Ives, a New York-based analyst with Wedbush Securities. “It’s an important lightning rod issue around unions globally.”

Neither Tesla nor Musk responded to requests for comment. But Musk has weighed in publicly on the labor actions in Sweden. On his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, he replied to a post about mail carriers refusing to deliver license plates to his customers by writing, “This is insane.”
He has also been clear about his attitude toward unions.

“I don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants kind of thing, and I think the unions naturally try to create negativity in a company,” he said at a conference in November. “If Tesla gets unionized, it will be because we deserve it, and it failed in some way.”

“Lords and peasants” is exactly the kind of relationship Tesla insists on having with its workers in Sweden, said Jānis Kuzma, 37, one of the striking technicians.

Kuzma said he joined Tesla in 2021 because he wanted to work on electric vehicles. He and his wife own a Tesla Model Y themselves. But as the company sold more cars in Sweden, the burden on its technicians increased, he said. He and the others at the Malmö service center had to take on a lot more work. The next-closest Tesla workshop was 170 miles away, so not a realistic alternative for most drivers.

After Tesla refused to give him a raise, Kuzma said, he decided to join the push for a collective agreement. The management didn’t seem to care that such agreements between companies and their employees are a central part of the Swedish labor market model, relied on in the absence of regulations such as a statutory minimum wage and credited with making strikes and other labor disruptions so rare. Kuzma said he was told, “Maybe Tesla is not for everybody.”

Several weeks into the strike, he said his manager called and accused him of leaking company secrets. The issue: Kuzma’s wife had criticized Tesla on X. “The craziest part is they were monitoring, they were checking my wife’s profile,” he said.

Kuzma pushed back with the help of a union lawyer, who argued that Tesla’s employee confidentiality provision, originally written for its U.S. workforce, could not trump Swedish free speech protections, which allow workers — and their partners — to talk about work conditions.

Today, about 65 percent of Swedish workers are part of unions, one of the highest rates in the world, and nearly 90 percent are covered by a collective agreement, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development…

It is not yet clear how the strike and sympathy actions will affect Tesla sales. The company’s Model Y crossover SUV was the best-selling car in Europe this year. In Sweden, it beat out Swedish-founded Volvo’s competing XC40, according to Mobility Sweden, an association of automakers and importers.

But Tesla no doubt is facing a public relations problem. The strike has been one of the biggest news stories in Sweden over several months, and opinion polls show the public is broadly supportive.

The unions are not backing down. Neither is Musk.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the United Auto Workers announced its plans to organize workers at Tesla, Toyota, and other non-union factories. The UAW won big pay increases at the Big Three factories in Detroit. In the past, efforts to organize auto workers have failed because many factories are located in the South, where anti-union sentiment is strong.

In a video announcing the campaign, UAW President Shawn Fain made the same arguments he did to Big Three workers this year as he rallied them to strike: Companies are making big profits while workers fall behind, he said.

“You don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck. You don’t have to worry about how you’re going to pay your rent or feed your family while the company makes billions,” Fain said. “A better life is out there. It starts with you: UAW.”

Many of the non-unionized companies, including Honda, Toyota, Hyundai and Volkswagen, have given their U.S. workers double-digit pay increases in recent weeks in what analysts call a clear attempt to ward off any unionization drive.