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.”

  • bamboo@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Dra@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      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

      • bamboo@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Dra@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • Dra@lemmy.zip
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              1 year ago

              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.