Here’s What Sweden’s Tesla Strike and Sinatra Teach Us About ‘Secondary Boycotts’
By Steve Wishnia
Swedish postal workers are refusing to deliver mail or packages to Tesla facilities in order to support a strike by mechanics at the company’s service centers there. It is one of many solidarity actions by Swedish unions that would be illegal under U.S. law.
In the first strike ever against Tesla anywhere, about 120 mechanics at its Swedish service centers walked out Oct. 27, after the notoriously anti-union electric-car manufacturer refused to bargain with their union, IF Metall.
About 470 more workers at other repair shops that fix Teslas joined the strike on Nov. 3, after the company’s Swedish affiliate refused any further talks, saying it was Tesla’s corporate policy never to sign collective-bargaining agreements.
Over the next two weeks, dockworkers refused to unload any Teslas arriving at Swedish ports. The electricians’ union Elektrikerna said its members would not maintain or repair the company’s charging stations. The Swedish Building Maintenance Workers’ Union stopped cleaning Tesla facilities in Stockholm and the northern city of Umea. Seko, the postal workers’ union, joined in on Nov. 20.
This seriously riled Tesla’s hectobillionaire owner, the mercurial egomaniac Elon Musk. “This is insane,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Nov. 23.
“This conflict is about wages, pensions, and insurance for our members who work at Tesla,” IF Metall President Marie Nilsson said in a press release announcing the strike Oct. 27. “But fundamentally, it is also about standing up for the entire Swedish labor market model. In Sweden, it is unions and employers who together agree on wages and working conditions in collective agreement negotiations.”
Not in the U.S.
All those actions have been illegal in the U.S. since 1947, when the Taft-Hartley Act outlawed “secondary boycotts,” strikes or boycotts in solidarity with a strike by workers at a different employer. The National Labor Relations Board defines them as industrial action by a union against a company on the grounds that it does business with another company engaged in a labor dispute.
Determining exactly what conduct is legal or illegal is “the most difficult area of labor law,” West Virginia University Law School professor Anne Lofaso, a former NLRB attorney, told Work-Bites in September.
For example, according to the NLRB, it is legal to picket a store that sells products made by the struck company to urge customers to boycott those products, but it’s illegal to urge them to boycott the store entirely, or to boycott products that account for all or almost all of its business. It is legal, however, for a union to picket a neutral company to force it to stop doing business with an employer who has refused to recognize or bargain with that union.
The secondary-boycott ban has often crippled union solidarity campaigns. In 2017-18, the New York building-trades unions led massive protests against the Related Companies’ use of nonunion contractors for some jobs constructing the Hudson Yards development. Their “Count Me In” campaign attracted support from elected officials, including then-Governor Andrew Cuomo and city Comptroller Scott Stringer.
But the unions couldn’t stop work on the job, because any such action by employees of different contractors would violate the secondary-boycott law. In May 2018, Related filed a complaint with the NLRB after members of Steamfitters Local 638 briefly walked out to demand that the developer use union sheet-metal workers.
Ironworkers Local 46, the union affected by Related hiring nonunion metallic lathers, was limited to having a handful of retirees picketing the site with signs that said they had “no dispute with any other employer.”
During the 2016 strike by Verizon workers in the Northeast, the NLRB sought injunctions against the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for picketing hotels where Verizon housed strikebreakers, on the grounds that it was a secondary boycott.
The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, passed by the House in 2021, would have repealed the Taft-Hartley provision banning secondary boycotts. But it went nowhere in the Senate because Republicans threatened to filibuster it.
Sweden is much more favorable to unions: Some 90% of workers are covered by union contracts, mainly through sectoral bargaining. IF Metall, the main industrial union, has 300,000 members in the country of 10.5 million.
“This will end with the employees winning a collective bargaining agreement, one way or another,” Susanna Gideonsson, president of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, told the Dagens Industri financial newspaper in early November.
The Swedish strike might also stimulate union organizing at Tesla factories in Germany, where it is the only nonunion automobile manufacturer. The massive industrial union IG Metall said in October that more than 1,000 workers at Tesla’s Grünheide factory had joined it, and that it was making progress at the “Gigafactory” outside Berlin.
The company announced a 4% raise for its German workers in early November.
In the U.S., however, Tesla fired more than 30 workers at its Buffalo plant in February, the day after Tesla Workers United launched an organizing campaign there. The union, affiliated with Workers United SEIU, called that illegal retaliation.
In 2017, a United Auto Workers campaign to organize Tesla’s plant in Fremont, California failed after the company fired more than 400 workers. In 2021, the NLRB upheld an administrative law judge’s ordering the company to reinstate one of the fired workers with back pay.
Solidarity vs. Sinatra
Perhaps the most spectacular secondary boycott in history came in 1974, when Frank Sinatra toured Australia. The legendary singer, by then despised the press, and in Melbourne, his bodyguards assaulted TV and print photographers. During a break in that night’s show, Sinatra denounced reporters as “parasites” and “bums,” calling the women “hookers” who he might offer “a buck and a half.”
The Australian Journalists Association asked other unions to boycott Sinatra. The Australian Theatrical and Amusement Employees Association refused to work his shows until he apologized. He couldn’t get room service in his hotel, because union waiters wouldn’t serve him. He couldn’t even leave the country, because the Transport Workers Union refused to fuel any plane he was on.
After three days and three cancelled shows, he was persuaded to issue a vague statement of regret, and the tour resumed.
However, Australia outlawed sympathy strikes and political strikes in 1983.