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Across Sweden, around seventy automotive technicians continue to confront one of the globe's richest corporations – Tesla. This labor strike at the American automaker's ten Swedish service centers has currently entered two years of duration, and there is minimal sign for a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been at the electric car company's protest line starting from October 2023.

"It has been a difficult time," states the 39-year-old. With the nation's chilly winter weather sets in, it is expected to become more challenging.

The mechanic devotes every start of the week with a colleague, positioned outside a Tesla service center on an industrial park in Malmö. His union, IF Metall, provides accommodation via a mobile construction vehicle, as well as hot beverages and light meals.

But it remains business as usual across the road, at which the service facility seems to operate at full capacity.

The strike concerns a matter that reaches to the core of Swedish industrial culture – the right of trade unions to bargain for pay and working terms on behalf of their workforce. This principle of negotiated labor contracts has underpinned labor dynamics in Sweden for nearly one hundred years.

Currently approximately 70% of Swedish employees belong to labor organizations, while ninety percent fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Labor stoppages across the nation are rare.

This is an arrangement supported across the board. "We prefer the right to negotiate directly with the unions and establish collective agreements," states a business representative from the Association of Swedish Businesses business organization.

However the electric car company has upset established practices. Outspoken CEO Elon Musk has stated he "opposes" with the concept of labor organizations. "I simply don't like anything which creates a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he informed listeners in New York last year. "In my view labor groups attempt to generate negativity within businesses."

The automaker entered the Scandinavian market back in 2014, and IF Metall has long sought to secure a labor contract with the automaker.

"But they did not respond," says the union president, the organization's president. "We formed the belief that they attempted to avoid or evade discussing the matter with our representatives."

She says the organization ultimately saw no other option except to announce industrial action, beginning on 27 October, 2023. "Typically it's enough to issue the threat," says the union leader. "Employers usually signs the agreement."

However not in this case.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, started working for Tesla in 2021. He asserts that wages and conditions were often subject to the discretion of supervisors.

He remembers a performance review where he says he was denied a salary increase on grounds that he "failing to meet Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a coworker was said to have been rejected for increased compensation due to he had the "wrong attitude".

However, some workers went out in the industrial action. Tesla had some 130 mechanics working at the time the industrial action was initiated. The union says that today approximately seventy of their represented workers are participating in the action.

Tesla has since substituted the striking workers with new workers, for which there is not occurred since the era of the 1930s.

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] openly and methodically," states German Bender, a researcher at a research institute, a policy organization supported by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It's not illegal, this being crucial to recognize. However it violates all established norms. But Tesla doesn't care for conventions.

"They want to be norm breakers. Thus when anyone tells them, hey, you are breaking a norm, they perceive that as praise."

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary refused attempts for comment in an email mentioning "record vehicle shipments".

In fact, the company has given just a single media interview during the entire period since the strike began.

In March 2024, the Swedish subsidiary's "national manager, the executive, told a financial publication that it suited the company better to avoid a collective agreement, and instead "to work closely with employees and give workers the best possible terms".

The executive denied that the choice to avoid a collective agreement was determined at Tesla headquarters overseas. "We have a mandate to take independent such choices," he said.

IF Metall is not entirely alone in this conflict. This industrial action has received backing by a number of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in neighbouring Denmark, Norway and Finland, decline to handle Teslas; waste is no longer removed from Tesla's Swedish facilities; and recently constructed charging stations are not being linked to power networks in the country.

Exists an example close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where 20 charging units stand idle. But a Tesla enthusiast, the leader of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, says vehicle owners are unaffected by the strike.

"There exists another charging station 10km from here," he says. "Plus we are able to continue to buy our cars, we can maintain our cars, we can charge our electric cars."

With stakes significant on both sides, it's hard to envision a resolution to the stand-off. IF Metall risks establishing a pattern if it concedes the principle of collective agreement.

"The worry is that that would spread," says the researcher, "and ultimately {erode