this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Polestar is Chinese.
Sort of. The parent company is Chinese, but you don't see the Swedish unions having massive strikes with Volvo or Polestar workers and they are headquartered there.
Maybe the reason why the Swedish unions aren't having massive strikes with Polestar workers might be slightly related to the fact that the are no Swedish workers in Polestar?
It is headquartered in Torslanda outside Gothenburg, Sweden. Its vehicles are produced in China, home to Volvo's corporate parent Geely.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polestar
It is true that there's no Polestar manufacturing in Sweden and Tesla's dispute seems to centre on those workers in Sweden. However there are still a couple of thousand Polestar employees in Sweden, whereas the Tesla action is against only ~120.
It is not just factory workers that are striking and getting involved. Every field in Sweden is unionised and it is not even just Tesla employees taking action against the company. As the link above states, dockworkers who are not affiliated with Tesla are refusing to unload their cars.
I'm pretty sure they are less than "thousands". Wild guess... Maybe around 788?
Polestar has white collar staff here. Finance, marketing, design etc.
Yeah, seems to be all white collar. I was going off another source I saw saying around 1900, but yours is suspiciously specific!
Anyway its definitely more than the 120 or so blue collar Tesla workers that started this whole thing.
I'm not saying that Polestar didn't follow the Swedish modell in Sweden. They most likely do.
However, if the subject is Chinese car manufacturers in the context of working against unions I think it's most honest to put Polestar in the box marked Chinese since the majority of their employees are in fact employed in China and the owning company is Chinese.
I'm swedish and as a Swede I've always been sort of proud of IKEA being Swedish. But then again... Was IKEA really Swedish when the founder was living in Switzerland, the company was owned by a foundation in some other country and a majority of the products were produced in other countries than Sweden?
What I'm trying to say is that Polestar, as many other companies, is Shrödingers Swedish company .. it's both Swedish and not Swedish at the same time ...
That's fair enough and all good points. Before this thread I didn't know about Volvo's parent company being Chinese and thought Polestar was simply a Swedish company owned by another Swedish company. Very disappoint to learn.
I feel like you'd be hard pressed to find a major corporation these days either not being owned by a foreign parent company/investor, or manufacturing their products in another country, or both. It's kind of understandable when the raw materials are abundant in the country of manufacture, but it becomes a problem when there are questionable labour practices there, as you say.
But Polestar has signed collective agreements in Sweden.
Signing a collective agreement doesn't in any way change the fact that Polestar is a Chinese company that manufactures their product in China and that China is not pro union.
So does Volvo and they haven't done much against unions. Chinese companies seem to adapt a bit easier to wherever they do business while American companies seem hellbent waging war against themselves like tesla do now.