The fact that the whole country collectively agrees gives the workers far more power.
Treated badly? Go work for a competitor. That’s how you put pressure on companies to treat staff better.
A society cannot rely on a business whose sole motivation is profitability to provide power to what they view as a liability, not an asset.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average...
Keep in mind that there was a massive rise in C-level and especially CEO compensation compared to most other wages. Arguably this can be traced back to a specific book being rather popular among wealthy investors and entrepreneurs that argued CEOs are underpaid, which many CEOs agreed with and convinced the investors to also agree with. But this does nothing for the wages of anyone outside this group because C-level compensation is orders of magnitude removed from that of anyone lower in the ladder.
The US has the 3rd highest median wages, and Sweden has the 14th highest median wage.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
It's up to the company to fulfil its mutually-agreed terms of contract to those employees. Which in most cases means giving them the dignity and security of a monthly paycheque.
In a free market economy (that isn't overly constrained by government and unions), employees can gain all the "power" they like by starting a company of their own, and setting whatever rules they like.
If you're seeking "power" without taking responsbility (i.e. running your own compnany), sounds like you want to indulge in politics, as opposed to a good-faith employee-employer relationship.
- Libertarians overlook all the problems with markets that Adam Smith identified. It's as though they never read the second half of the book.
- Libertarians overlook how existing players raise barriers to entry for existing markets.
- Libertarians overlook the collusion between market players and government to share power and wealth between both.
- Libertarians make many, many, many assumptions that are demonstrably false.
At this point all we can assume is libertarians know all this, yet keep advocating for libertarianism because it is they who seek the power and the wealth. That is to say, the libertarians are the bad guys, or, they're the stupid guys.
Everything has a simple solution until humans get complicated.
There's no market incentive for companies to "treat staff better" (which is really an oversimplification when it comes to basic things like following workplace safety laws, providing paid medical leave and health insurance, not cheap window dressing like foosball machines and free energy drinks) beyond the minimum you can get away with. Payroll is one of the biggest cost factors in most businesses if not the biggest. That means companies are always incentivized to cut labor costs where possible. This is why you say mass layoffs followed by share price increases.
If you really want "the market" to fix this problem, ban individual ownership of corporations and require all businesses to act as worker cooperatives. This gives every worker equal power in whichever business they decide to join and gives the owners an incentive to treat workers better because the workers are the owners. You could also do this incrementally by offering public grants to creating cooperatives or turning existing corporations into cooperatives (e.g. by creating a subsidized program to allow workers to "buy out" a bankrupt employer).
We don't want a top-down autocratic state so why should we accept a top-down autocratic corporation ruled by a single owner or a non-working board that is only interested in the resale value of the company, not its long-term profitability or sustainability?
Many cultures have bribery as an unwritten rule and custom. Every official you run across is expecting a small bribe.
Should companies adopt that culture as well?
Coiuntries are sovereign. Foreigners don't decide, that's a key outcome of the thirty years' war. So if you go to X, the polite, proper, non-imperialist thing is to follow accepted custom.
Of course, that raises the question of what "accepted custom" means. It's not clear to me that bribing is really accepted in the countries where it's a custom, widely accepted, rather than being something people do reluctantly.
For example: Will you use oil from Saudi Arabia for your business? You could refrain because so much of the payment gets sidetracked to those 4000 princes, or because refraining brakes the climate changes a little bit, or even both.
The list goes on. There's much that's bad in the world.
Deciding to be principled about bribes and morally flexible about the rest seems… okay to me. Not particularly bad.
The only reason international firms are sometimes a little circumspect about that is because they also operate in home countries where bribery even in foreign countries is often against the socially enforced (written, in this case, but what is important is the enforced part, not written vs. unwritten) rules and customs.
E.g., https://www.trade.gov/us-foreign-corrupt-practices-act
Businesses and unions are better at knowing the needs of companies and people than what any government is.
Not everything has to be achieved through laws.
In Sweden we generally prefer to avoid laws whenever possible, deferring to best practices, common sense and business agreements.
That’s a much much nicer model than what we now get from eg EU where we get micro-level law making that deals with everything and more
The level of reactions against Tesla does not make the system look 'nicer' than others: Maybe effective but actually quite brutal.
It’s up to the companies and unions to handle.
When Tesla has refused that for 5 years + have a global policy to refuse, then they are not handling it, which makes companies and unions react.
To be clear: Companies in Sweden largely prefer this model over one governed by law.
Not relying on laws like this allows for more adaptability to local conditions or preferences, if the system allows this, while also having mechanisms for enforcement when a company has simply decided "we don't do business that way, and we don't care if that runs counter to the local norms".
It's not supposed to be nice. Swedish labour has understood a simple reality, you don't fight on your opponents terms. Elon Musk has a competitive advantage at hiring lawyers and buying politicians. So they pick the battle where they can actually win, collectively on the factory floor.
And just like tesla have the right to refuse signing, the people of sweden has the right to strike.
You went from calling this a bit “odd” and “a peculiarity” to “actually quite brutal” in the span of two comments. Jesus Christ the level of JAQing off in these Tesla threads from “the outside” (I wonder where) is insane.
It's simple. Above a certain size, you either get an agreement or no one will do business with you.
Put this way, it should tickle every libertarian mind. Free actors operating in an open market.
I think I would've agreed with this sentiment in the past.
However, the last 7-8 years in the US have shown that (at least in politics) rules need to be spelled out. We had a bunch of informal agreements of what people in certain positions should do or not do, but as we have seen someone will eventually come around and look to test the limits.
It looks like Elon Musk is looking to test the limits of business expectations in Sweden. I hope Sweden fares better than the US did when the political expectations were being challenged.
People coming round to test the limits is fine, the problem is that in the US parts of the ruling class has decided the (short term) benefits of tolerating severe transgression to those limits is worth it, in effect simply removing the limits.
The problem is simply that limits don't work if there is no the willingness by the people in power to enforce them, and this regardless of if them are informal or formalised limits. Many things things Trump did were simply illegal, but since Congress didn't impeach for these crimes they just become "controversial actions".
You mean like rent and monopoly seeking and corporations try to buy politicians and eliminate competitors so they can force consumers into submission?
Looks like a case of using the power you have, like corporations do. Why do you take a dim view of collective action when capitalism is a system that is slanted toward rich corporations?
Also Musk here is typically full of shit: he makes various libertarian noises but Sweden's system is largely untouched by government, it's an understanding between larger corporations and workers (unions). Sweden even got an opt out from EU minimum wage laws to preserve this understanding. Musk should be rejoicing the unfettered capitalism, but in reality he just wants everything his own way, and thinks he can get it.
Consider the complexity of a vending machine vs. a can where people can leave their payments... Any society probably has places where you need the former, and places where you can get away with the latter, but I prefer those societies where most of the places in between are on the can end of the spectrum.
This isn't about some sort of grandiose libertarian stand. Whether this behavior by Tesla is influenced by Musk or not, it perfectly matches his attitude to workers' rights, consumer protection laws and so on. At one point he explicitly stated that the US Democrat party was being controlled by unions and class action lawyers. Contrast this with Musk's excuses for censoring Twitter in Turkey when the Turkish government threatened to block Twitter. He doesn't stand up to "bullies" or "authoritarians", he just doesn't like being told what he can or can't do by those he sees as beneath him (e.g. workers insisting on adherence to workplace safety laws or industry standard compensation schemes).
> "It's about the Swedish collective agreement model, and there is a consensus on it, both politically and between the parties in the labour market, Seko's president Gabriella Lavecchia told Reuters by email.
And yet this is not a legal obligation, as far as I understand, and Tesla is acting lawfully. So the model seems to be that there are unwritten rules and that the whole country is allowed to club you into submission if you don't follow them.
At this point it seems that at least some form of legal obligation (you give an example) would clarify what is understood to be compulsory... Transparent rule of law is also a model for a good reason.
From the outside it's a little odd (at least to me) that the Swedes seem adamant that Tesla must accept a collective agreement and also that there is no need to make that the law. That's the peculiarity, IMHO.