Tesla’s Nordic Shareholders Seek to Promote Workers’ Rights in Vote

The fight over Elon Musk’s pay package and the vote over whether to move Tesla’s headquarters to Texas have been the main focus of attention ahead of the company’s shareholders meeting on Thursday, but not for investors from Nordic countries.

Tesla’s major shareholders in Sweden, Denmark and Norway are instead looking to the meeting to bring the issue of labor rights at the automaker to the fore.

Behind the campaign is the strike of Tesla’s mechanics in Sweden. Now stretching into its sixth month, the dispute has drawn in unions from across the region that have joined in blockades aimed at bringing the U.S. carmaker to the negotiating table to reach a collective agreement with its Swedish workers.

Several of the biggest shareholders in the Nordic countries are urging others to back a proposal that would require Tesla to respect the right of workers to assemble.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. It has remained resistant to unions in Europe, even in countries with strong traditions of organized labor. Mr. Musk has expressed his disdain for organized labor. “I disagree with the idea of unions,” he said at the DealBook Summit in New York last year.

None of Tesla’s factories are unionized, potentially giving the company an advantage over rivals like Ford Motor, General Motors and Volkswagen that must pay union wages. But in the United States, Tesla is a prime target for the United Automobile Workers union, which is in a strong position after winning the largest wage increases in years recently for workers at unionized plants.