Over 90 percent of Swedish workers are covered by collective bargain agreement. https://akademssr.se/lon-karriar/yrkesfragor/chef/anstallnin... https://www.mi.se/nyheter/2022/kollektivavtal-sa-ser-de-vita...

That is correct. Union membership is lower though and trending downwards: https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/redaktionellt/fler-kvinno...

More additional information that might be worth knowing especially for American friends.

Sweden (like many other countries) engages in sectoral bargaining where trade unions or labor unions make a collective agreement that covers all companies in the sector. Trade unions form confederations demarcated by occupation and they negotiate with their counterpart employer organisations to get deals that cover most of the sector. In other words, there are existing labor agreements from multiple sectors that cover millions of workers.

Tesla has the bargaining power is fly shit against unions and confederations that represent 80-90 percent of the Swedish workforce.

> Few people working at Tesla Sweden have joined the strike

Tesla claims that 90% of their employees in Sweden have refused to strike, but that figure seemingly includes office workers and others who would never have been part of the metalworkers' strike to begin with. The union itself claims about 50%. [0]

[0] https://da.se/2023/11/sa-manga-strejkar-pa-tesla-if-metall-g...

And threats about losing their stock options if they participate, or if you're a worker not on a permanent visa you're afraid of losing your job as Musk is known to fire people over this.

Which is kinda why the strike is from other workers in other companies.

The threats are illegal.

>PostNord, the leading postal service has also joined the solidarity strike

Given PostNord's less than stellar efficiency, this could be entirely unintentional on their part :-)

Haha very true

What I find interesting in this whole situation is that there are huge Swedish companies like Spotify (which I believe are run/founded by Swedes) that do not have a union agreement [0]. Yet somehow Musk is the evil American capitalist that does not respect local customs :)

0: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/sweden-s...

Even though Spotify does have some metal in their catalogue, I don't see how a metalworkers union could strike against Spotify. Instead of some anti-US sentiment that you not-so-hidden point at, the real answer is different unions with different cultures and bargaining power.

I guess a /s was missing from your the first part of your comment. Still, the sentiment I sense is mostly anti-Musk/anti-billionaires. It’s fine to talk about differences in cultures but when you have Swedish companies founded by Swedes (and how are now also billionaires) doing the same thing as Tesla, the narrative kind of brakes down imho. How did Spotify get away not having a union for over 15 years?

>How did Spotify get away not having a union for over 15 years?

I think you are missing the point here. You seem to be basing your expectations on one union by how another union behaves. I have no idea why they do what they do, but this is not some kind of US hate thing - that's a bit far-fetched in my opinion.

Ask yourself this: Where you live, is the culture and history of a union representing metalworkers the same as those that would be representing someone from Spotify? In most countries, unions in different areas act very differently. Programmers, metalworkers, miners, academia - their unions are more often than not very different.