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Comment by 0xDEF | Hacker News Reader

Tesla is shooting itself in the foot by not being pragmatic.

Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are combined the 3rd biggest market for Tesla. During some months we even edge out China temporarily becoming Tesla's 2nd biggest market.

The way our unions are being portrayed by Americans is ridiculous. Even pro-union Americans are making our unions sound far more aggressive and subversive than they actually are. A "blockade" just means no unionized workers and truck drivers want to offload and transport your products and supplies. It doesn't mean a literal blockade.

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I think there’s just a cultural difference between Sweden and the US into how the postal service is viewed.

In the US, the postal service is the OG government service - the power of Congress to create post offices is explicitly called out in the Constitution when it was signed.

Further, the US postal service has a mandate to provide mail access to every residential address - even if’s some remote island in Alaska.

I think the idea that the government can just throw up its hands when faced with a private labor strike, and say “Nothing we can do” is just baffling to us in the US.

Frankly, that should be the norm.

If employees are being abused, let them ask for their rights.

It does seem penny wise and dollar foolish for Musk/Tesla to be playing these games.

Foolish? From the guy who spent 44 billion on Twitter to then run it into the ground? Noooo, it can't be, Musk is a business genius. /s obviously

> The way our unions are being portrayed by Americans is ridiculous.

Americans policymakers believe in freedom of association only when it suits them.

Its cool for Google or banks to close all your accounts without any reason, and make your life impossible.

Its wrong for all unions/workers to refuse to work with Google and make their business impossible.

This feels very disingenuous, and pretty unfair. I don’t think most Americans think it’s ok for google or banks to act that way, and I also feel very uncomfortable about a sort of “mob rule” system… where informal agreements dictate which businesses are allowed to operate.

They both feel weird for roughly the same reasons: arbitrary decisions instead of laws dictate which behavior is tolerated for which group of people. In both cases the rights of individuals seem like they’re subject to the whims of other groups of people, instead of “liberty and justice for all.”

> arbitrary decisions instead of laws

You're free to go to a court and fight against a strike organized by a union. If the court decides the strike is unlawful, the union will have to pay and stop striking.

Strikes and unions are not as arbitrary as it might seem.

It's written in jest, it's more of an observation of what seems to be taking place rather than how individuals feel.

> I don’t think most Americans think it’s ok for google or banks to act that way

Will Americans support laws to encode that Google or banks can't do that? I don't think so. You'd think it could be a bipartisan slam dunk, but, hey!

> where informal agreements dictate which businesses are allowed to operate.

They're not informal. They're part of Swedish law and the Swedish economic system. Tesla is attempting to act like a not-Swedish company in Sweden and is reaping what they've sown.

You say that "laws dictate"--sure, and the Swedish system delegates the particulars to the employer/union interaction much as, for example, the United States delegates to the regulatory regime. Unions can agree to pretty wide-ranging outcomes in Sweden. They, collectively, are refusing to do that.

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