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In Sweden, around seventy automotive mechanics continue to confront one of the world's wealthiest companies – Tesla. This labor strike targeting the American carmaker's 10 Swedish service centers has currently reached two years of duration, with little indication for a settlement.

Janis Kuzma has remained at the electric car company's protest line starting from the autumn of 2023.

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

The mechanic spends each Monday alongside a fellow worker, positioned outside a Tesla service center within a business district located in southern Sweden. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, provides shelter in the form of a portable construction vehicle, as well as coffee and light meals.

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

This industrial action concerns a matter that reaches to the core of Swedish industrial culture – the right of trade unions to bargain for wages & conditions on behalf of their members. This principle of negotiated labor contracts has underpinned labor dynamics across the nation for almost a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Scandinavia's employees are members to labor organizations, and 90% fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Labor stoppages across the nation occur infrequently.

This is an arrangement welcomed by all parties. "We favor the ability to negotiate directly with worker representatives and sign collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise business organization.

But Tesla has disrupted established practices. Vocal chief executive the company leader has said he "disagrees" with the idea of unions. "I simply disapprove of anything which creates a sort of lords and peasants situation," he told an audience in New York last year. "I think the unions attempt to generate conflict in a company."

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

"Yet they did not respond," states the union president, the union's president. "We formed the belief that they attempted to avoid or not discuss this with our representatives."

She states the organization ultimately saw no other option except to call industrial action, beginning in late October, 2023. "Typically the threat suffices to issue the threat," says Ms Nilsson. "Employers typically agrees to the contract."

But not in this case.

Janis Kuzma, who is of Latvian origin, started working with the automaker several years ago. He asserts that wages and conditions frequently dependent on the discretion of managers.

He remembers an evaluation meeting at which he states he was denied an annual pay rise because he was "failing to meet company targets". Meanwhile, a colleague was said to have been rejected for increased compensation because having an "inappropriate demeanor".

Nevertheless, some workers participated on strike. Tesla employed some 130 technicians employed when the industrial action was called. The union says that today around seventy of its members are participating in the action.

Tesla has since substituted the striking workers with new workers, for which there is no precedent since the era of the Great Depression.

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] openly & systematically," says German Bender, a researcher at Arena Idé, a think tank supported by Swedish trade unions.

"It's not illegal, this being crucial to recognize. However it goes against all established norms. But Tesla doesn't care about norms.

"They want to become norm breakers. So if anyone tells them, listen, you are violating a standard, they see this as praise."

The company's local division refused requests for comment in an email citing "record vehicle shipments".

Indeed, the automaker has given only one media interview in the two years since the strike started.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, Jens Stark, informed a financial publication that it benefited the organization more to avoid a collective agreement, and rather "to work closely with employees and provide them optimal conditions".

The executive denied that the choice not to enter a labor contract was determined at Tesla headquarters in the US. "Our division possesses authorization to take independent such choices," he said.

The union is not completely isolated in this conflict. This industrial action has received backing from several of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in nearby Denmark, Norway and Finland, are refusing to process the company's vehicles; waste is not removed from the automaker's Scandinavian locations; and newly built power points remain connected to power networks across the nation.

There is an example near the capital's airport, where twenty chargers stand idle. However Tibor Blomhäll, the president of enthusiasts group Tesla Club Sweden, says vehicle owners remain unaffected by the strike.

"There's another charging station six miles from here," he comments. "Plus we are able to still buy our cars, we can maintain our cars, we can power our cars."

With consequences significant on both sides, it's hard to envision an end to the stand-off. IF Metall faces the danger of establishing a pattern if it concedes the fundamental concept of negotiated labor contracts.

"The worry is that this could expand," says Mr Bender, "and ultimately {erode