Tesla’s attack on collective bargaining is part of a “worrying trend” which has seen workers’ rights eroded more quickly in Europe than in any other region of the world, according to a major new report.

The conduct of Elon Musk’s company, which has sparked a historic strike at its manufacturing plant in Sweden by refusing to engage in collective bargaining, is singled out in the 2024 ITUC Global Rights Index as an example of violations of collective bargaining rights occurring in more than half of European countries.

The right to strike is being violated in three quarters of European countries, including Finland where the government wants to limit political strikes to a single day and undermined wage negotiation as part of what the report calls an “unprecedented attack on the Nordic social model.”

The report says this is part of a “long-term deterioration” in respect for workers’ rights in Europe, which is now the part of the world which has seen the “worst decline” in rights since the first index was published in 2014.

The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) is calling for the new EU Commission to defend and promote trade union and workers’ rights, including the universal right to organise, union access to workplaces and, the right to bargain collectively, and the right to strike.

It is crucial to tackle the problems exposed in this report by banning companies which refuse to respect workers’ rights, such as collective bargaining, from receiving public money.

Findings on Europe from the 2024 ITUC Global Rights Index:

• 73% of countries violated the right to strike: “Contributing to the general deterioration across the region were the criminalisation of strikes and the stigmatisation of strikers in Belgium and France, as well as the use of an excessively broad definition of essential services to restrict or ban strikes in Albania, Hungary, Moldova, Montenegro, and the United Kingdom.”
   
•  54% of countries violated the right to collective bargaining: “For months in 2023, Sweden’s IF Metall union tried to engage Tesla in collective bargaining, while the company persistently refused and maintained its hostile anti-union stance. Employers [also] exploited weak laws to avoid collective bargaining in European countries including Greece and the Netherlands.”
   
• 41% of countries excluded workers from the right to establish or join a trade union: “Employers in Armenia and Poland meddled in union elections, while yellow unions were created in Armenia, Greece, the Netherlands, and North Macedonia to thwart independent worker representation.”
   
• Europe has shown the steepest decline among all regions, from a rating of 1.84 out of 5 in 2014 to 2.73 in 2024: “This continued descent indicates that the European ‘worker-centric’ social model is being actively dismantled by governments and businesses at an accelerating pace, with serious implications in the region and the risk of it triggering a global race to the bottom for workers’ rights.”

Commenting on the findings, ETUC General Secretary Esther Lynch said:

“In Europe, we’re rightly proud of our social model which has at its heart the rights of worker to come together in unions and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions.

“However, this report makes clear that our social model is being eroded at an alarming rate by bad bosses like Elon Musk and anti-worker governments like that of Finland.  

“This is a recipe to supercharge the inequality on which the far-right thrive and destroy the workplace democracy which all the evidence shows is the first defence against them.  

“The results of the European elections show we need to defend and rebuild our social model. That should start with a ban on companies receiving public money if they refuse to engage in collective bargaining.”