Elon Musk threatens Berlin factory over union vote

The ballots opened Monday at Tesla’s only European factory, and the vote counting may end up being the most consequential thing to happen in German labor relations in years.

Roughly 11,000 workers at the Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg in Gruenheide, a small town in Brandenburg state, are choosing their works council representatives in a Monday-through-Wednesday election that has turned far more charged than a routine labor vote typically would. On one side stands IG Metall, Germany’s powerful metalworkers union, pushing hard for a majority it narrowly missed in 2024. On the other is Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk has made no secret of what he thinks the workers should do.

“Things will certainly get more difficult if there are external organizations pushing Tesla in the wrong direction,” Musk said in a pre-recorded video message sent to the workforce last week, according to the German business newspaper Handelsblatt. He was blunt about the stakes: expansion plans for the plant would not move forward under those circumstances.

The threat landed hard in a factory that has already quietly shed about 1,700 jobs over the past year, cutting its workforce from roughly 12,415 to 10,703, while plant manager Andre Thierig publicly denied any significant reductions were underway.

Works councils are embedded deep in the fabric of German corporate life. Under German law, these elected employee bodies negotiate working hours and pay structures, weigh in on health and safety, and must be consulted before major workforce decisions are made. Tesla’s Gigafactory is the only major automotive plant in Germany operating without a union-backed collective bargaining agreement, a situation labor researcher Ernesto Klengel of the Hans-Boeckler Foundation called “a real exception.”

IG Metall has accused Tesla of poor working conditions, covert job cuts and a sustained campaign to keep organized labor out of the plant. The union wants a 35-hour workweek and a formal collective agreement. Management has rejected both demands flatly.

The weeks leading into this election produced a remarkable string of confrontations. In December, Tesla threw what workers and media widely mocked as an “anti-union concert” on factory grounds, featuring German rapper Kool Savas and a Cybertruck on display. Then in February, Thierig accused an IG Metall representative of secretly recording a closed works council meeting, filed a criminal complaint and called police to the plant. Officers seized the union representative’s laptop. IG Metall called the allegation “a brazen and calculated lie.”

Both sides ended up in a labor court last week, reaching a temporary truce to suspend public statements about the incident until after the election. The criminal complaint remains active.

The commercial backdrop makes Musk’s expansion threat look shaky. Tesla’s European sales fell 28% in 2025. In Germany, registrations collapsed 48% to just 19,390 units, against a factory capable of producing over 375,000 vehicles annually.

IG Metall regional manager Jan Otto dismissed the investment ultimatum outright. “As long as sales figures are down, Tesla will not build a factory at all,” he said. “Not here and not anywhere else.”

The Brandenburg state government, for its part, said carefully that it “encourages companies in Brandenburg, including Tesla, to conclude collective agreements.” Otto went further, telling Musk directly to “accept the rules of the game of co-determination and democracy in German companies.”

Election results are expected Wednesday. Whatever the outcome, the fight over what a unionized Tesla factory means for the company’s European future is nowhere near over.