Just before Christmas, I paid a visit to the dockers at the industrial harbor of Esbjerg in southwestern Denmark. That day, Danish dockworkers began their solidarity conflict in support of the Swedish Tesla workers’ strike, refusing to unload the company’s vehicles from any Danish harbor. Starting that same day, Danish truck drivers also refused to transport Tesla’s cars and goods. Similar actions were taken by Finnish unions, and Norwegian unions are about to join in.

These kinds of cross-border solidarity actions have been seen before, for example during the Liverpool dockers’ strike during the 1990s, but they aren’t very common. It shows that a certain radicalism and internationalism is still a living part of the Nordic labor movement. But most of all it underscores that even though the Swedish strike only concerns a small number of Tesla employees, the Nordic unions view the Tesla conflict as a question of principle. They see it as a fundamental clash — between the Nordic labor model where almost all workers are covered by collective agreements (CBAs), and the anti-union stance of a new era of tech corporations like Tesla.