Marie Nilsson once said her strongest cultural memory was of attending an infamous Bruce Springsteen concert in Gothenburg in 1985. The crowd jumped up and down so much during his version of “Twist and Shout” that they damaged the concrete underpinnings of the Ullevi stadium.
The head of IF Metall, Sweden’s largest industrial union, now has the chance to take part in an even bigger Swedish cultural event involving a powerful American: the 59-year-old has set the country’s unions on a collision course with Elon Musk and his carmaker Tesla. The labour dispute, which has escalated almost daily over the past month, pits the Swedish view of trade unions being at the heart of its economic model against Musk’s long-held antipathy to organised labour.
Nilsson has never shied away from a fight, becoming the first woman on her shift team after joining the chemicals group Borealis in western Sweden in 1982 and then the first female leader of the union with 300,000 members in a country of just 10.5mn people. “In this organisation, you can’t be a shrinking violet. It doesn’t really work,” she told labour journal Dagens Arbete in 2017 when she became president of IF Metall.