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Across Sweden, around seventy automotive technicians continue to challenge one of the globe's wealthiest companies – Tesla. This industrial action targeting the US carmaker's 10 Scandinavian service centers has currently entered two years of duration, with little indication of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has remained on the Tesla protest line since the autumn of 2023.

"It's a difficult period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. And as Sweden's cold seasonal conditions arrives, it is expected to grow more challenging.

Janis devotes each Monday alongside a fellow worker, standing outside an electric vehicle service center within an industrial park in Malmö. His union, IF Metall, provides shelter in the form of a portable builders' van, plus hot beverages & sandwiches.

However it's operations continue normally across the road, at which the service facility seems to be at full capacity.

The strike concerns an issue that reaches to the core of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the right for worker organizations to negotiate wages and working terms on behalf of their workforce. This principle of collective agreement has supported labor dynamics in Sweden for nearly a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Swedish workers are members to labor organizations, while ninety percent are covered by a collective agreement. Labor stoppages across the nation are rare.

This is an arrangement supported across the board. "We prefer the ability to bargain directly with the unions and establish collective agreements," states a business representative from the Association of Swedish Enterprise employer group.

But the electric car company has disrupted established practices. Outspoken CEO Elon Musk has stated he "disagrees" with the concept of labor organizations. "I just don't like any arrangement which creates a sort of lords and peasants sort of thing," he told listeners in New York in 2023. "In my view the unions try to create negativity within businesses."

The automaker entered the Scandinavian market starting in 2014, and the metalworkers' union has long wanted to secure a labor contract with the company.

"Yet they wouldn't respond," says the union president, the organization's president. "We formed the belief that they tried to hide away or not discuss this with us."

She says the union eventually found no alternative except to announce industrial action, beginning on 27 October, last year. "Typically it's enough to issue the threat," comments the union leader. "Employers usually agrees to the agreement."

However this did not happen on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, who is of Latvian origin, began employment for Tesla in 2021. He asserts that pay & conditions were often dependent on the whim of managers.

He remembers an evaluation meeting at which he says he was denied a salary increase on grounds he was "failing to meet Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a colleague was reported to be turned down for increased compensation because he had the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, some workers went out on strike. The company employed approximately one hundred thirty technicians working at the time the strike was initiated. The union states that today around 70 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.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] openly and methodically," says German Bender, a researcher at Arena Idé, a think tank financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It is not against the law, this being crucial to recognize. But it violates all traditional practices. Yet Tesla shows no concern about norms.

"They aim to become convention challengers. So if somebody informs them, hey, you are breaking a norm, they see this as a compliment."

The company's local division declined attempts for comment via correspondence citing "all-time high vehicle shipments".

Indeed, the automaker has granted only one press discussion in the two years after the industrial action began.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, Jens Stark, told a business paper that it suited the company better not to have a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with the team and give workers optimal terms".

The executive rejected that the choice not to enter a labor contract was one made at Tesla headquarters in the US. "We have a mandate to make our own such choices," he stated.

The union is not completely alone in its fight. This industrial action has received backing by a number of labor organizations.

Port workers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Nordic countries & neighboring states, are refusing to process Teslas; rubbish is no longer collected from Tesla's Scandinavian locations; while newly built power points remain linked to power networks in the country.

Exists an example close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where twenty chargers stand idle. However a Tesla enthusiast, the leader of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, says Tesla owners are unaffected by the strike.

"There exists another charging station 10km from this location," he says. "And we can continue to buy our cars, we can maintain our vehicles, we can power our cars."

With stakes high for all parties, it's hard to envision an end to the stand-off. The union risks setting a precedent should it surrender the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

"The concern is how that would spread," states the researcher, "and eventually {erode