(1) It’s an incident André Thierig, Tesla’s director of manufacturing for its German plant, called “truly beyond words!” A union representative from Germany’s largest metalworker’s union, IG Metall, is being accused of secretly recording a meeting of the plant’s employee council on Tuesday. According to Thierig, Tesla “called police and filed a criminal complaint!” Someone recording a meeting may not sound all that explosive at first, but the labor mess at the Berlin-Brandenberg Tesla Gigafactory has dragged on for years now, and since German work-related norms and laws reflect an alien society sorely lacking in American freedom, the details may be a little tricky to grasp if you’re unfamiliar with European labor politics, but here’s what you might want to know to get up to speed: IG Metall has been duking it out with Tesla in Berlin since around the time the plant first opened. Potential employees during initial hiring reported, according to IG Metall, that they were being offered 20% less than German autoworkers with collective bargaining agreements. Giga Berlin remains the only non-union automotive plant in Germany. Not necessarily a push toward ‘unionization’ In defiance of the stereotype you may have in your head, unions aren’t dramatically more common in Germany than the U.S. But that’s not because the labor movement there is as feeble as the one we have here. As is common across Europe, the ubiquity of sectoral bargaining means that collective bargaining agreements are common for non-union workers. About half of German workers have collective bargaining agreements, and wage and conditions standards are significantly more worker-friendly nationwide. In neighboring France, unions are even less common than in Germany, but 96% of private sector workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements. In other words, labor conflicts outside the U.S. might not necessarily revolve around the familiar climax of a card check, and result in employees having a contract and paying dues. Even without a union or a collective bargaining agreement, all German workplaces with more than 20 employees are covered by elected works councils—and that’s core to what’s happening at Giga Berlin right now. Management-controlled works councils can be boring channels of communication that merely prevent conflict between workers and their bosses, or, when controlled by a union, they can be major pain points for the company. Why IG Metall stuck around after a defeat