Musk won his battle with Swedish union but it is still business as usual

One of my bugbears about journalists – myself included – is that we tend to pile into stories when they first develop, explain why they matter, then forget about them and move on to the next new thing. But there is value in paying attention to how stories end.

Take, for example, the battle that broke out three years ago between Elon Musk and Sweden’s trade union movement. In 2023, a group of Tesla mechanics in Sweden went on strike over their employer’s refusal to sign a collective agreement with their union, IF Metall.

Other unions joined in. They halted postal deliveries, waste collection and the unloading of cars at ports.

The stakes were high. Musk did not want to set a precedent that he would recognise unions anywhere. And Sweden’s trade unions did not want to allow Tesla to undermine the country’s labour market model, in which government regulation takes a back seat and employers and unions negotiate the rules between themselves.

Journalists flocked to cover it. Musk called it “insane”. But how did it end?

Musk won. This summer, IF Metall announced that it was calling off the strike after more than 1,000 days because Tesla had bought out all the striking members.

“Without workers on strike, there is no strike,” said Veli-Pekka Säikkälä, the collective bargaining secretary at LO, the Swedish trade union confederation, in a statement at the time.

What does it mean that Musk was victorious? For the global labour movement – and indeed anyone with ambitions to curb the power of the tech titans of our age – it is hardly encouraging that even one of the strongest trade union movements in the world could not force Tesla to the table.

After all, the Swedish unions have high membership levels, deep pockets and a supportive institutional set-up, all things that elude unions in many other countries.

In the US, for example, trade unions thought they had secured a historic victory in 2022 when workers in an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted to form a union. But more than four years later, Amazon has still not even negotiated a contract.

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But while the “Swedish model” could not break Musk, it does not seem as if Musk has broken the Swedish model either. Although trade union officials did worry that Tesla could be the thin end of the wedge, those I spoke to on a recent visit to Stockholm took some solace from the fact that they have continued to sign collective agreements with other companies, including with tech firms that will help to shape the future of the economy.

After a year of negotiations, for example, including a strike threat, video games company King (maker of Candy Crush) signed a collective agreement with Swedish unions last month.

“The Tesla strike is important because it’s an emblematic company in the green transition – at least it was,” German Bender of the think tank Arena Idé, who wrote a book on the conflict, tells me. “But the strike ended, the union lost, and the Swedish model hasn’t crumbled.”

What if the strike had gone the other way and Musk had been the one to lose? Entering into the Swedish way of doing things could have given him an insight into a very different type of trade unionism from the American style he knows and dislikes.

Although they have become known in recent years for their fight with Tesla, in fact, Sweden has the most pro-technology trade unionists I have come across.

Susan Schurman, professor of labour studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, says that Nordic unions in general understand that it is vital for employers to remain competitive in export-led economies.

“They don’t focus on restraining technology; they focus on: ‘How do we incorporate this in a way that will help our companies remain competitive and make sure our members get their fair share of the profits?’” she tells me. “American unions have not historically thought this way.”

Indeed, the Nordic region’s powerful unions have hardly held companies back on implementing the latest tech. Sweden has been called the Silicon Valley of Europe because of its high number of start-ups.

Meanwhile, the percentage of businesses that have adopted artificial intelligence is higher in Denmark, Finland and Sweden than any other country in the OECD’s database – and well in excess of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average.

As one Swedish trade unionist put it to me: “We don’t fear new technology. We fear old technology.” A sentiment with which Musk – were he willing to listen – would probably agree. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026