Germany’s biggest union is taking Tesla to court over a laptop seizure it calls a calculated lie timed to derail a crucial election. By Stewart Burnett
Germany’s largest industrial union, IG Metall, has filed a defamation complaint against Tesla Gigafactory Berlin plant director André Thierig, also applying for a labour court injunction against the automaker. The development, triggered by a police visit to the plant over allegations of a meeting being illegally recorded, marks the latest escalation of a confrontation that the union says has reached “unprecedented aggression” from the company’s management.
The legal actions follow an incident from earlier in February wherein Tesla called police to a works council meeting, accusing an IG Metall representative of secretly recording the session on a laptop. The union has rejected this charge entirely, describing it as “a brazen and calculated lie”.
Police seized the representative’s computer during the meeting, and prosecutors in Frankfurt have confirmed that an investigation is underway. Under German law, recording a non-public meeting without two-party consent is a criminal offence. Hence Tesla’s allegations have been taken as highly inflammatory and serious.
IG Metall said the laptop’s owner has since offered prosecutors full access to the device to expedite the inquiry and refute Tesla’s account of events. Thierig, on the other hand, has taken to Chief Executive Elon Musk’s social media platform X, posting: “What has happened today at Giga Berlin is truly beyond words! An external union representative from IG Metall attended a works council meeting. For unknown reasons he recorded the internal meeting and was caught in action! We obviously called police and filed a criminal complaint!”
The union is equally explicit about what it believes motivated the episode. Works council elections at the Grünheide plant are scheduled to be held on 2-4 March, with around 11,000 employees eligible to vote, and IG Metall argues Tesla engineered the incident to damage its standing in the weeks before polling. As it stands, the union holds 16 of 39 seats on the current works council following the 2024 election and has spent two years organising to secure a majority. Should the union prove successful, it would gain the leverage to pursue a 35-hour working week—already standard at every other automotive plant in Germany.
Tesla has taken an openly combative posture ahead of the vote. Thierig has previously drawn a public “red line” against the shorter working week and warned that a union-friendly result could prompt Tesla’s US leadership to halt further investments at the plant. The company also staged an anti-union concert and introduced a 4% pay increase timed to sidestep the works council.
Giga Berlin remains the only automotive factory in Germany without a collective bargaining agreement, a distinction Tesla has fought to preserve since the plant first opened in 2022. Relations between the IG Metall union and the automaker have been fraught for much of this time; in March 2025 the union accused it of intimidating its workforce, scrutinising worker sick notes and withholding pay.
The confrontation is unfolding a fraught backdrop of crashing Tesla sales across Europe. The automaker sold roughly 235,000 vehicles across Europe in 2025, a 28% decline on the prior year, against a plant capacity exceeding 375,000 Model Ys annually. German registrations fell 48% over the same period, with January 2026 bringing further declines of 59% year-on-year in Germany, 81% in the Netherlands and 93% in Norway.
Tesla quietly cut around 1,700 positions at Grünheide over the past year, reducing headcount from 12,415 to 10,703, even as management publicly denied that redundancies were taking place. IG Metall Regional Leader Jan Otto said the company “must not be allowed to get away with this”, while works council candidate Philipp Schwartz warned that employees “no longer want to be looked down upon as if they were machines that can be replaced when they no longer function as desired.”
