Tesla sues Sweden over postal strike
Tesla sues Sweden over postal strike
The electric carmaker has asked the courts to impose a fine of $96,000 if Sweden fails to ensure license plates for new cars. Organized labor is not only hurting Musk's business in Sweden, but also in Germany.
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As far as I know the situation is:
- Tesla wants/needs license plates
- government issues license plates and tries to send them via mail to Tesla
- workers strike and don't deliver mail to Tesla, which means license plates don't arrive at Tesla - and only specifically at Tesla
- government has an exclusive contract, that only allows them to use that one postal service, so they can't provide an alternative (assuming the workers there wouldn't strike, too)
- government doesn't allow pick up of license plates
Tesla challenges the very last point - Why can no one (not only Tesla) just go and pick them up? Why is there a need to explicitly mail them?
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Yeah, and they use that specific postal company because it's the biggest in Sweden and is government owned.
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No, but I will admit that Tesla should be allowed to go and physically collect the licence plates themselves. Otherwise it would be like the government is encouraging the strike which is not ideal when they shouldn't be involved at all.
And a court also decided that yesterday.
No it doesnt, it's not law. That's just how they decided to do it, and is why Tesla just won an injunction forcing them to allow pickup
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The suit is against the Swedish Transport Agency, according to the article.
In some cases, you can't sue the state due to sovereign immunity. However, in this case, it's acting as a business. And I'm pretty sure that in the US, when the government is acting as a business, sovereign immunity generally doesn't apply.
googles
In the US, it sounds like originally you couldn't sue the postal service due to sovereign immunity. Then the US waived sovereign immunity in a number of cases, but specifically kept an exception for delayed mail, not exposing the USPS to liability for it. So my guess is that this lawsuit couldn't happen in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolan_v._United_States_Postal_Service
Dolan v. United States Postal Service, 546 U.S. 481 (2006), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, involving the extent to which the United States Postal Service has sovereign immunity from lawsuits brought by private individuals under the Federal Tort Claims Act. The Court ruled that an exception to the FTCA that barred liability for the "negligent transmission of mail" did not apply to a claim for injuries caused when someone tripped over mail left by a USPS employee. Instead, the exception only applied to damage caused to the mail itself or that resulted from its loss or delay.
But it sounds like that's pretty borderline, and if Sweden's legal environment is slightly different, it might be acceptable to sue on that point in Sweden.
EDIT: Oh, I'm sorry. PostNord is the equivalent to the USPS, the SOE that does the delivery, and where the strike is occurring. The STA is the license-issuing authority.