Strike at carmaker prompts sympathy action from dockers, painters and postal workers in fight over Swedish labour model

Elon Musk has decried a wave of “insane” strikes focused on Tesla workshops in Sweden, as workers target the US electric car manufacturer in a strike calling for collective bargaining rights.

In what has been portrayed as the largest fight in decades to save Sweden’s union model from global labour practices, the powerful trade union IF Metall has been leading a strike across eight Tesla workplaces in Sweden for five weeks.

It is the first time workers for the US carmaker have gone on strike and on Thursday, Musk, the tech billionaire and chief executive of Tesla, made his feelings clear, writing on X, formerly Twitter: “This is insane.”

  • @[email protected]
    7•10 months ago

    There is no litteral translation that I can find, but an approximate would be:

    Go to heck, old man!

    • no banana
      9•10 months ago

      Pretty much. DeepL offered “go to hell, sourpuss” which I also find to be in the spirit of the phrase. I intentionally chose those words to make it a bit difficult to properly translate. You can be sure that it is a proper curse however.

      • Dojan
        5•10 months ago

        It’s somewhere between the two.

        Fanders is a “cleaner” version of “fan”, a dated term for the devil. Rather akin to how how you could say heck instead of hell, or fiddlesticks instead of fuck.

        Surgubbe is a compound word consisting of the words sur meaning sour/crabby/moody, and gubbe, which generally means old man. Gubbe on its own could also be an endearing term without any sort of age indication related to it. One could say something like “men åh lilla gubben” to a kid that’s like faceplanted or something.

        Personally I’d say surgubbe has a bit of a juvenile tone to it, which I think sourpuss also conveys. It lacks the gender that surgubbe has though.

        • no banana
          1•10 months ago

          Yep. Good explanation.