Tesla is suing the Swedish transport agency, accusing it of a “discriminatory attack” on the US electric carmaker, after strike action prevented its new vehicles from getting licence plates in Sweden.
The lawsuit is an escalation in a row that started between the car company and the union representing Swedish Telsa workers, who are calling for collective bargaining rights and have been on strike for five weeks.
The strike called by IF Metall, which has more than 300,000 members in Swedish industry, has attracted multiple secondary, or sympathy, industrial action by unions representing among others postal workers, dockworkers, electricians and painters.
On Thursday, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, decried the secondary action at the postal service PostNord as “insane” after licence plates were prevented from reaching new Tesla cars.
According to the Swedish financial newspaper Dagens Industri, the carmaker said in documents submitted to to Norrköping district court on Monday: “This confiscation of license plates constitutes a discriminatory attack without any support in law directed against Tesla.”
The country’s transport agency confirmed that a lawsuit had been submitted to the court by the car company.
A spokesperson said: “Tesla believes that the Swedish Transport Agency does not meet the requirement to provide registration plates to newly registered vehicles in Sweden. We at the Swedish Transport Agency do not share this view and therefore Tesla has decided to have the issue tested in court, which is their right.”
The spokesperson said the agency had yet to see the lawsuit, but added: “We need to look at the lawsuit and Tesla’s reasoning in it. Reasonably, the district court will allow the Swedish Transport Agency to express itself in the case and thus our attitude to Tesla’s reasoning will be clear. The district court may then examine the matter.”
Tesla has also reportedly demanded that the district court allow it to collect the number plates from the manufacturer while legal procedures are carried out.
A senior IF Metall official, Veli-Pekka Säikkälä, said: “We note that Tesla has chosen to take the long route, starting legal proceedings. There is a simple and quick way to solve this situation, and that is to sign a collective agreement. As soon as Tesla does that, the conflict ends.
“Swedish law state that authorities should not choose sides in labour market conflicts. We assume that the Swedish Transport Agency will remain neutral in the ongoing conflict, as they should.”
TM Sweden, Tesla’s Swedish subsidiary, is also understood to be pursuing legal action against PostNord for failure to deliver post.
The postal company said the union ST had blockaded mail deliveries from PostNord to TM Sweden as a “sympathy measure for IF Metall”. The right to strike is “constitutionally protected and so strong that it can be considered force majeure”, PostNord added.
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A spokesperson said: “We now need to read the lawsuit and form an idea about the content and what it means. First and foremost PostNord is neutral in the conflict.”
The fight for collective agreements – which cover conditions including salary, pension, working hours and holidays – is being portrayed as the largest attempt to save Sweden’s union model from global labour practices in decades. It has been likened to the 1995 strikes at Toys R Us, which Swedish unions won.
Since the start of the Tesla strike, the Swedish global payment firm Klarna has signed a collective agreement with workers to prevent planned action at its Stockholm headquarters. Some commentators have suggested that the strikes affecting the carmaker could restart conversations oon the issue at the Swedish division of the streaming firm Spotify.
In Norway, Fellesforbundet, the largest union in the Norwegian private sector, has said it would block Swedish Teslas from coming to the country.
Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.