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.”
Guys, this is what success for the working class looks like.
If the ruling class is upset, it’s because we’re doing something right.
If they’re content, it’s because they’re fucking us up the ass with no lube or reach-around.
They literally want us to roll over and just take it. And some of us are proud to. Glad that number is rapidly diminishing, though.
Frfr, hate on them high billys
I would love to see the number of people upvoting this who are genuinely working class.(remember, every downvote on my reply is a middle class person who does not practice what they preach)
Middle class is the working class and I support our unions. When I worked for one I got a fair wage and just because I’m not in one currently doesn’t mean you cant support them.
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 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.
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.
Ofc every upvote is working class. There is no other reason I would upvote that comment
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i think your replying to the wrong person there buddy
No your
Ah yes. I might have missed the memo where you became the Judge of who is working class or not.
(And remember if you answer my comment you admit that you have no Idea what you are talking about and are just here to troll 🥸)
.(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.
Bet you thought you were super smart with that one
It’s an accurate observation, and it’s not so much that I consider myself smart, it’s more that I note most negative replies generally refuse to acknowledge the underlying issue (read: dumb).
The reason they have so many downvotes is because they buy them cheap on Amazon.com
OnT: I’m Swedish and it’s good to see a proper strike, but the real thing motivating the unions on this isn’t workers rights or anything. The unions are subservient to the national labour union organisation, LO, who’ll do the shadiest shit to get more power for themselves, and don’t care about working conditions in the slightest. The only thing that’s a red line for them, is when corporations refuse to take part in the charade, by not signing a collective agreement.
You have to pay some lip-service, even if it costs you. If you do, the unions will be on your side against the workers.
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Downvote for r word
Downvoted for, well, being retarded.
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.
Yes, the ecological impact is bad. I was focused on organizational efficiency as it was the subject of the comment I replied to. Also here’s a study from Oxford University about it https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4119492
We find that SpaceX’s platform strategy was 10X cheaper and 2X faster than NASA’s bespoke strategy
If ecology is to be the top priority then NASA budget could probably go into ecological transition research too instead of the new moon project.
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.
It has been working out for ISS astronauts, hasn’t it? I guess that’s a bit more than an MVP.
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.
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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!
His real skill is getting people to work hard. And he brought the iterative design he learned in software development to the physical world. Pared with family money, hire the right people to do the work, and you get SpaceX.
His real skill is getting people to work hard.
Did you really just say that on a post about how his workers are striking?! LOL!
Musk whines: “This isn’t fair, I’m rich, poor people have to do what I say! Get back to work peasants! Why isn’t it working?!”
Hmmm calling your workers insane for striking due to their lives and wellbeings endangered, seems entirely responsible and in no way insane.
Is he out of touch? No it is the workers who are wrong.
He’s actually referring to the sympathy strikers. No Tesla can get a licence plate or registered in solidarity with the autoworkers.
Well, SOMEONE is gonna have to make sacrifices and we all know that it can’t be the rich guy, so…
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.
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
Nobody earns a billion dollars, that’s impossible. People turn into billionaires by stealing the wages and wealth from their workers.
And imaginary wealth in stock market value.
I love thinking about how much of his imaginary wealth was lost due to his Twitter mismanagement.
The sound of strong unions is music to my ears.
There are almost no minimum wage laws but 90% of workers are unionized or represented in some way. They strike very rarely because employers know unions are strong there but when they do, oh boy the whole country is behind the workers on strike.
130 mechanics started the whole thing!
Good for them. This abuse of workers collective bargaining rights is just divide and conquer. Unions cannot work if you allow them to disappear.
It has to be said that the unions in Sweden do not want minimum wage because it would give employers another argument against them in negotiations. Even Elon uses it in countries that do have it.
He should just call them all pedophiles, that should resolve the issue.
That whole call people paedophiles for the lolz was originally supposed to be my joke 😭
Yeah the problem with that kind of humour is that eventually you’ll attract the people who think the same thing unironnically.
But preferably only in person face to face and as a joke. Not as behind your back, messing with you kind of thing
To me, proof that Elon Musk is a doofus and not as smart as he thinks he is, is that he had this public persona of “real life Iron Man” billionaire playboy thing going, and within just a couple years his public image has become “douche bag with too much money”. Obviously that one is way closer to reality, which is exactly my point.
Someone with half a brain would have hired a PR team to keep the original image intact for as long as possible, but he’s so egotistical and so prideful and so oblivious he thinks he can let his real self on display and that’ll just carry him
I think most people are at a point where they only really want to know what he’s up to to make fun of him.
I would love it if people would just stop talking about him
do you think that will make him go away? Stop shining a light on the dark and disgusting in the hopes that they just disappear? Doesn’t work like that pal.
If you actually cared, there are ways of stopping phony stark from coming up in your feed, yet here you are
who? Elon Musk you mean? That brilliant billionaire inventor and leader?
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dude he HAS a massive PR team to keep his image up, hell that PR Team is the only reason why people had this image of him in the first place
He has literally fired most (not sure if all?) of Tesla’s PR team in the past as well as Twitter’s. Guy doesn’t believe PR is worthwhile.
ya, he has a personal PR team, why keep the others around? you want proof of his PR team, tho? take a look at the massive wave of “Musk is irl Iron Man articles” and how they always include a specific set of phrases and accomplishments to list.
For a while there I had hope he was doing it so he could run as a republican and then do a flip on them when he got elected.
Just started passing things usually called literal.
This was 5 years ago
Evidently he has Asperger’s, so there might be a non-nefarious explanation for his lack of understanding of social things and why he is both simultaneously so successful/creative but also completely socially inept.
He might be actually incapable of understanding others’ perspectives.
You do not need to understand others on an emotional level for this, you can come pretty far on rationals alone. This excuse might work in a personal relationship, not here.
I agree. But not everyone is wholly rational at all times and some people think they are being rational when in reality they made mistakes in their logical thought processes.
Asperger syndrome: A developmental disorder affecting ability to effectively socialize and communicate. Asperger syndrome is a condition on the autism spectrum, with generally higher functioning.
All I said was there may be a non-nefarious reason for him being the way he is. Are you arguing that he is definitely acting out of malice? If you are, I’d like to understand the reasoning you are using. I’m not trying to fight here, I’m trying to understand.
Not this again, really just shitting on Autistic people by saying stuff like this.
How is admitting the possibility of something shitting on them? I am trying to understand.
I still believe in him
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’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.
“They are insane” = “I’m so far out of touch I can’t understand people who work for a living”
- “people giving a shit about the other people in their country”
More like ‘I’m a sociopath who thinks petty things like empathy and basic human rights are stupid. Now get back to work, my servants are meant to be seen, not heard.’
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 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. A hundred billion is unknowable. If anything, your points are even more poignant.
I think they are referring to his actual salary and not his “worth”.
Billionaires, the true Unskilled Worker
Worker is a bit of a stretch.
