Tesla filed a criminal complaint and called police to its Gigafactory Berlin after accusing an IG Metall union representative of secretly recording a closed works council meeting on Tuesday. Police seized the representative’s laptop. The incident comes just three weeks before roughly 11,000 employees vote in a works council election that could reshape the future of the plant.
The confrontation marks the latest, and most dramatic, escalation in the increasingly bitter fight between Tesla and Germany’s most powerful industrial union at the automaker’s only European factory.
What reportedly happened
Tesla plant manager André Thierig said an external IG Metall representative attended the works council meeting as a guest and was caught recording it with a laptop. Thierig posted on X:
“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 representative reportedly refused to hand over the laptop to site security. Works council chairwoman Michaela Schmitz then contacted authorities, and police arrived at the Grünheide plant on Tuesday afternoon to confiscate the computer.
Under German law, works council meetings are strictly non-public. Recording such a session without consent constitutes a criminal offense, as these meetings address sensitive employee matters and internal workplace discussions. Tesla argued that the recording was a serious breach of confidentiality rules.
IG Metall rejected the accusation entirely. The IG Metall Tesla Workers GFBB group, which holds 16 seats on the current works council, the largest single faction, but not a majority, called Tesla’s account “a brazen and calculated lie.” The union framed the incident as a manufactured scandal designed to damage IG Metall’s standing ahead of the March 2–4 election and announced plans to take legal action against those responsible for what it called a “smear campaign.”
A plant already under mounting pressure
The timing is difficult to ignore. Tesla management has been openly campaigning against an IG Metall majority for months. In late December, Thierig drew a “red line” against the union’s push for a 35-hour workweek, warning that Tesla’s US-based leadership would halt expansion plans at the plant if the election results favor IG Metall. Tesla even threw a concert for employees featuring rapper Kool Savas, an event widely described as “cringe” anti-union propaganda, and announced a 4% pay raise without involving the works council or the union.
The recording incident doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Giga Berlin is the only non-union automotive plant in Germany, and Tesla has fought to keep it that way since the factory opened. In the 2024 works council election, IG Metall won the most individual votes, about 39.4%, but non-union lists secured a combined majority of seats. The union has been organizing to flip that result in March.
Meanwhile, the plant’s workforce has been shrinking. A Handelsblatt report confirmed that Tesla quietly cut roughly 1,700 jobs at Giga Berlin over the past year, reducing headcount from 12,415 to 10,703, a nearly 14% decline, all while Thierig repeatedly denied any staff reductions were taking place.
The broader market context is grim. Tesla’s European sales collapsed 28% in 2025, with Germany down 48%. January 2026 brought another brutal decline across major markets, with registrations down 44% in five key European countries. A Nordic reputation study released last week ranked Tesla dead last among 30 companies in Germany, with the largest reputational collapse the survey has ever recorded in over a decade of research. A separate survey found 94% of Germans would not consider buying a Tesla.
Giga Berlin now has more production capacity than it needs for a European market that is actively rejecting the brand.
Electrek’s Take
The outcome of this recording incident will depend entirely on what investigators find on that laptop. If there is evidence of an unauthorized recording, it will be a genuine scandal for IG Metall and could damage the union’s credibility right before the vote.
If no evidence supports Tesla’s claim, the company will have called police to a works council meeting, an extraordinarily aggressive move, over nothing, and handed IG Metall a powerful campaign talking point about intimidation.
But regardless of who is telling the truth about Tuesday’s events, the bigger picture is hard to miss. Tesla management has spent months threatening workers with disinvestment if they vote the “wrong way”, threw an anti-union concert, pushed through a pay raise specifically designed to sideline the works council, and now filed a criminal complaint against a union representative three weeks before the election. That’s not the behavior of a company confident it has the workforce on its side.
The real question isn’t whether someone hit record on a laptop. It’s whether Giga Berlin has a viable future at all. With European sales in freefall, the brand’s reputation in Germany at historic lows, and 1,700 jobs already quietly eliminated, the factory looks increasingly redundant. If IG Metall wins the March election, Tesla has already pre-loaded the excuse to scale back. If it loses, the underlying demand problem remains. Either way, the roughly 10,700 workers still at the plant are caught in the middle of a fight that has very little to do with their interests.
I honestly fear that Tesla might use the union vote as a potential excuse to close or scale back Giga Berlin.
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