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?
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.
Okay strap in this gets wild:
I am currently reading "Silent Coup" - very interesting book.
It talks about the international mechanisms by which we legally took the sovereignity of nation states.
As byproduct of free trade agreements most countries are liable to be sued by foreign companies. There are absurd cases where forein investors undermine democratic decisions in order to ensure their pofit interests.
South Africa - for example - after ending Apartheid wanted to change the deal with diamond mining rights. They wanted to add a tax to ensure that black people get a fair share of the wealth extracted from their soil. But one italian multinational didn't like this - so they sued and won. SA wanted to keep this as silent as possible so that no other company would sue. But they had to grant them a huge cut: from 26% of profits to 5%.
Many other examples, this one just stood out to me.
On first glance it seems absurd that some company can sue a sovereign country over democratic decisions, but this is the world we live in. Fuck free trade agreements, fuck coorporations, fuck the whole World Bank & Breton Woods machinery.
https://www.counterfire.org/article/silent-coup-how-corporations-overthrew-democracy-book-review/
https://icsid.worldbank.org/cases/case-database/case-detail?CaseNo=ARB(AF)/07/1
A whooping 96000 dollars?
If that suit was in the US, Tesla would sue for Millions.
Goes to show what a country looks like, when business profit interests are not put before everything else
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Tesla on Monday filed a lawsuit against the Swedish state over a postal workers strike that is hindering deliveries of license plates for the electric carmaker's new vehicles.
The Texas-based automaker is already trying to fend off strike action on several fronts in the Scandinavian country over its refusal to agree to a collective wage agreement for Tesla mechanics.
As Swedish license plates for new cars are only delivered by mail, the blockade threatens to stop any new Teslas being used in the country for the foreseeable future, a move CEO Elon Musk branded "insane."
However, collective agreements with unions are the basis of the Swedish labor market, covering almost 90% of the country's workforce, safeguarding their salaries as well as working conditions.
Elsewhere in Europe, Musk's anti-union efforts haven't stopped Tesla workers at its Brandenburg plant in Germany from joining the IG Metall union in rising numbers amid concerns around health, safety and overwork.
In October, more than 1,000 Tesla employees demanded better working conditions in a first-time action at the factory in Grünheide, which is in the Municipality of Brandenburg just outside Berlin, according to IG Metall.
The original article contains 254 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 26%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!