Elon Musk has decried a wave of “insane” strikes focused on Tesla workshops in Sweden, as workers target the US electric car manufacturer in a strike calling for collective bargaining rights.
In what has been portrayed as the largest fight in decades to save Sweden’s union model from global labour practices, the powerful trade union IF Metall has been leading a strike across eight Tesla workplaces in Sweden for five weeks.
It is the first time workers for the US carmaker have gone on strike and on Thursday, Musk, the tech billionaire and chief executive of Tesla, made his feelings clear, writing on X, formerly Twitter: “This is insane.”
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I would love to see the number of people upvoting this who are genuinely working class.
The middle class is a made up idea designed to divide the working class. You either have to work for a living or you don’t, and slightly higher income and a bit of savings doesn’t make your function in society entirely different even if it allows you more comfort.
Nope. Totally different universes. Middle class people in the west like to roleplay as downtrodden but none of them have worked actual working class jobs and all enjoy at least some security of education
So you’re trying to tell me that because I have a degree, work in an office job, and have some savings, that I’m not working class? If I lost my job I’d have a few months in savings before I’d be digging into retirement funds, and even then I’d probably be completely broke within a year or two. That’s certainly a lot more comfort than someone who would miss rent next month, but ultimately I still am dependent on an employer and selling my labor, I do not have anywhere near enough money to live on dividends or interest payments. I see much more in common with someone making minimum wage than I do with the owner class who lives on rent, interest, and dividends without working.
You dont think that’s middle class? Because you have to work to not run out of money?
So do most of the upper classes. What you have the luxury of an education that allows them some freedom to work, and the comforts of knowledge work that allow them to not have to sacrifice their physical health and, most likely an income bracket that at least affords you some choice in where you live.
The point is that high levels of migration, effectively forces your own countries working classes to compete with and deal with tons of cheap foreign labour coming in, with little or no conformity to the parent culture because it hasn’t been facilitated. The middle classes traditionally laugh at the working classes and claim they are being “racist”, “stupid” and “lazy” for complaining about this arrangement, while mostly avoiding it’s effects themselves.
This voting is a result of the left wing, middle classes being unable to grasp the obvious effects of their voting record, instead pretending to each other in echo chambers that they are the real working classes and how shocking all this right wing-tilt is. Throwing the incumbent working class culture under a bus.
You either live off wealth or you live off income. If you live off income you are a worker and workers need to stand together.
This is, as I have described above, all well and good to say…
…Apart from when you repeatedly support policies that further squeeze extant working classes, then have the gall to do this vague virtue signalling of “standing together”. It’s hypocritical.
You are doing local workers in the country a disservice and the owning classes a great help to price them out of existence.
You can call it middle class if you want. But it’s also working class. Even most petite bourgeois are working class as they cannot live off capital interest.
Bet you thought you were super smart with that one
.(remember, every downvote on my reply is a middle class person who does not practice what they preach)
Yeah no, that’s not how this works. You’re being downvoted for posting a stupid comment.
Cry harder billionaire.
Literally made his money on exploitation and lies. SpaceX is amazing, but built on much smarter minds; he was just the wallet. And he bought Tesla and has been lying and overpromising since he did.
NASA could do what SpaceX does if we gave NASA the money we gave SpaceX. I won’t even give him credit for that.
And don’t change their goals every 4-8 years. It is hard to accomplish a 10 year project if you can’t guarantee you’ll still be working on it in 10 years.
Yeah, and keep getting admins like Cheney that hate random programs
Meh another repeat of private shark corp vs government zombie group, would be interesting though
Doubtful, big administrations have big issues with productivity and meeting goals. Not that I think it is thanks to Musk, but startups/scaleups organizations are often much more efficient than traditional companies and administrations.
I think every engineer who has worked both at a big traditional company and a startup can confirm.I’ve worked at both and cannot confirm. Startups are good at shipping new features, but that’s usually because we don’t spend as long planning, have less legacy code to work around, and most importantly, we cut a lot of corners. These behaviors are not good for space travel
I think SpaceX is demonstrating that a lot of IT startup methodology actually works for the space industry too. Most famously, accepting that making errors makes you learn faster, with their many rocket explosions, this is like short iterations in IT. This is opposed to the years long planning and studying to make sure everything is 100% perfect before launch of traditional space industry. They are out-competing every public and private space industries (such as ArianeGroup) with their methods, it seems to work pretty good.
Exploding rockets over populated areas and putting debris in the sky is bad. Wasting money in explosions is also bad. I don’t think startup mentality belongs anywhere outside of SaaS. If you disagree on this then we’re likely not going to reach common ground when talking about spaceX.
I also don’t agree that they’re out competing NASA, nor do I agree that that’s even a worthwhile measure here because something so dangerous shouldn’t be subject to the market. Getting exclusive contracts from the government is too political to truly say they’re better. The F-23 was better than the F-22 but the 22 won the contract anyway.
Startups are the land of the MVP, and I don’t mean Most Valuable Player. You don’t want to be sending MVPs into space? Don’t use a private company. NASA has bureaucracy but it also has stability, accountability, and the ability to think long-term.
Wtf are you on about? We give SpaceX nowhere near the funds we give NASA.
We gave NASA $25 billion this year.
SpaceX was awarded a $2.9B contract to fund the entire “land starship on the moon” program (a non cost+ contact I might add) spanning multiple years. They launched two sets of crew to the iss this year, at an estimated cost of ~700m. They have had one cargo mission this year at a cost of about $150m.
Let’s give NASA that 2.9b for a new program then. That’s a 10% budget increase.
Hell give me $2.9b and I’ll find people to put us on the moon. Elon didn’t do shit except take tax money, and give it to smart people, while keeping a cut for himself.
Do it then. Nobody else in the industry seems able to.
When it comes to space programs and launch costs/waste, SpaceX is at the bottom of the list. Nobody puts stuff in space cheaper than they do. And not by a small margin.
For comparison, the cost for SLS to launch into earth orbit is $4.1B. TO LAUNCH. Development costs for that program have exceeded $27B. They have been working on it since 2011. It has launched exactly one time over a year ago.
The entire contract to SpaceX to fully develop and launch a moon lander is less than the cost of launching a single SLS rocket.
Alright I’ll do it when I get the cheque.
The stuff they put into space cheaply is actually debris from their poorly built launch pads that ricocheted off a school bus.
But didn’t he also go above and beyond to have him portrayed as founder of SpaceX?
Yeah, and I’m fairly certain he bought the right to be called ‘founder’ of Tesla… From the founders.
He did He paid millions for their nda’s
Then almost immediately bankrupted Tesla. Was their first near miss of going under.
Story has been retconned on their website to say Elon fixed the car. That the Roadster wasn’t even close to production ready. He did neither.
What really happened is he wanted to redo much of the looks of the car to put his stamp on it. They spent a small fortune tweaking the Elise body to make it look just slightly less like one. Ballooned their production costs and added a ton of delays. The original team was going to use the Elise chassis as it came from Lotus and people had already lined up to buy that.
That’s what all “visionary entrepreneurs” do. They pretend like they made every single product they sell with their bare hands and all the engineers and scientists designing them and the factory workers fabricating them are just for decoration.
I’m also convinced that they’ve breathed enough of their own farts that they genuinely believe most of the things they say.
No he actually founded spacex, you’re thinking of Tesla.
Yup. The groundwork for privatized space travel had been in the works for a decade or two by that point. But musk wanted to buy an icbm and Russia said no. So he was convinced by much smarter people to become the money mark.
Literally made his money on exploitation and lies. SpaceX is amazing, but built on much smarter minds; he was just the wallet.
Not to mention 100’s of millions of subsidies from the US government. Space X could never have survived with only his wealth!
I feel like if someone is insane, it must be Musk, trying to circumvent the unions in a Nordic country, which have one some of the strongest unions and union culture in the world.
They used to have an even greater influence… These days there are no real extended demands, just smaller pay rises for many unions. And the social democratic political parties have severed the historical ties to them i many countries.
The collective agreements are still pretty strong, with unions blocking companies unwilling to agree to these collective Agreements.
Like when Burger King came to Denmark I believe it was, they refused to make collective agreements, and like in Sweden now, many other unions joined in year long boycotts until Burger King caved and agreed to comply.
McDonald’s made collective agreements from the start, but had some tax evasion scheme that resulted in them not paying any taxes for decades up until fairly recently.
There is still cross union solidarity, that flair up now and again. But lobbied so called “yellow unions”, that offers economical security benifits but without politics for a much lower fee price have chipped away at the older more classic unions.
The US is one of the most active places union wise these days. God knows they need it.
I’ll take “Things petulant billionaires say when they don’t get their way” for $1000, Alex.
He’s so persecuted. Guys, guys, be nice to Elon. He’s just the victim here. There’s no way these strikes are a direct response to his policies and business practices.
Poor thing.
“Waaaah my precious market forces are working against me.”
They’ve seen 50-100% payrises in many cases - unions are important.
Unions that are bottom up organizations are important, Unions that are beholden to the political class are just a way to control us.
Sure, I guess.
Eating vegetables is good too - rotten vegetables are bad to eat though.
Remember how the railroad workers trid to strike & congress shut them down? Unions in America are not like Unions in Europe.
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Sometimes it’s not about the truth of the statement, but how it’s attempting to shape a certain narrative, that gets the vote, up or down.
Typical rich person mentality. How easily they forget they don’t create wealth in a vacuum. People are only that rich off the hard work of other people
Billionaires, the true Unskilled Worker
Let’s appreciate the insanity of opening factories in countries with some of the best unions and laws supporting unions and then doing a pikachu face when those unions go and decide to bust your kneecaps for essentially abusing the workers… Elon why did you even open a factory in sweden? It was obvious from the beginning this would happen.
Probably some insidious long term plan to weaken unions in Scandinavian countries.
I mean, he makes several hundred times what any of those workers make. That’s because his labor is just soooo much more valuable than anything they could do, should be easy for him do all their work too, right?..right?
Yeah, just a friendly reminder that no rich person is “self-made.” Their wealth (especially billionaires) is built off the backs of hundreds, often thousands of exploited workers, combined with favors and handouts from the government.
I love watching Musk screech and scream while his ass gets clapped by unions, keep it up!
I mean, he makes several hundred times what any of those workers make.
Not several hundred times more. A Million times more. If you made 100k, he made 1000 x 1000 as much as you to make 100 billion.
A Billion dollars is an unfathomable amount of money. If anything, your points are even more poinent.
I think they are referring to his actual salary and not his “worth”.
I’m an American that hasn’t been to many other countries, but Sweden is fortunately one of them. The culture is different from what I’m used to, and it boils down to respecting the dignity of the people around you, and in the process respecting yourself as well.
So, it’s very nice to see the solidarity of the workers, but also not surprising. In a good way.
I don’t see that Tesla can ‘win’ here. They either comply or get out. If the leadership is rational; they cooperate so they can start making money.
Poor guy. It must be so difficult watching his workers joining together to demand their fair share of his company’s profits. It’d be a real shame if workers in other countries follow suit. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it must be to be a billionaire. Those poor bastards.
Musk could spend a million dollars per day for 500 years and still be a billionaire. That’s a literally incomprehensible amount of money.
He could single-handedly end world hunger and barely notice a difference in his staggering wealth. Just paying his fair share of taxes would have a seismic effect on the US in so many ways, but instead he hoards more and more, siphoning wealth from those who need it most into coffers so large, he can’t even really notice.
It’s obscene.
Totally is. And the appetite doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the tipping point yet. Unfortunate.
The appetite is limitless. Wealth hoarding is just like every other type of hoarding. They’re trying to fill a hole in themselves with stuff, and they collect far more than will ever be useful to them, to the detriment of themselves and everyone else. Billionaires just do it at a scale that hurts us all.
If workers tried this in Canada the police would roll them over.
It’s a crime to block roads and railways in protest here, unless the police like you, then they take selfies with you.
Oh here is some of your own medicine, how does it taste?
More Trump-like shit. Anyone who opposes him is ‘deranged’ or ‘crazy’.
Nazicuntsayswhat
