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Across Sweden, around seventy automotive mechanics persist to confront one of the world's wealthiest corporations – Tesla. This industrial action targeting the US carmaker's 10 Scandinavian repair facilities has currently entered its second anniversary, with little indication for a resolution.

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

"It has been a difficult time," states the worker in his late thirties. And as Sweden's chilly winter weather arrives, it is expected to grow more challenging.

The mechanic spends every start of the week with a colleague, standing near a Tesla service center within an industrial park in Malmö. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, provides accommodation via a mobile builders' van, as well as coffee & sandwiches.

However it remains operations continue normally across the road, where the service facility appears to operate at full capacity.

This industrial action concerns a matter that goes to the heart of Swedish labor traditions – the authority for worker organizations to bargain for pay & working terms representing their members. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported labor dynamics in Sweden for almost a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Scandinavia's workers are members of a trade union, while 90% fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes across the nation occur infrequently.

This is a system supported by all parties. "We favor the ability to negotiate directly with the unions and establish collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise business organization.

However the electric car company has disrupted the apple cart. Outspoken chief executive Elon Musk has stated he "opposes" with the idea of unions. "I simply don't like any arrangement that establishes a sort of lords and peasants situation," he told listeners in New York last year. "In my view labor groups attempt to generate conflict within businesses."

Tesla came to Sweden starting in the mid-2010s, and the metalworkers' union has long wanted to establish a collective agreement with the automaker.

"Yet they wouldn't reply," states Marie Nilsson, the union's leader. "We formed the belief that they tried to avoid or evade discussing the matter with our representatives."

She says the organization ultimately found no other option except to call a strike, beginning on 27 October, 2023. "Usually it's enough to make the threat," comments Ms Nilsson. "Employers usually signs the agreement."

However this did not happen on this occasion.

Janis Kuzma, who is of Latvian origin, started working with the automaker in 2021. He asserts that pay and work terms were often subject to the whim of supervisors.

He remembers a performance review at which he states he was refused an annual pay rise because that he "not reaching company targets". At the same time, a colleague 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. The company had approximately 130 technicians employed when the industrial action was called. The union says currently around seventy of its members are on strike.

Tesla has long since replaced the striking workers with replacement staff, a situation there is not occurred since the era of the 1930s.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] openly and systematically," states German Bender, a researcher at a research institute, a policy organization financed by Swedish trade unions.

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

"They want to become convention challengers. So if somebody informs them, listen, you are breaking a norm, they perceive that as praise."

The company's local division declined requests for interview in an email mentioning "record deliveries".

Indeed, the company has granted just a single media interview during the entire period after the strike started.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, the executive, told a business paper that it benefited the company more to avoid a union contract, and instead "to collaborate directly with employees and give workers the best possible conditions".

The executive rejected that the choice not to enter a collective agreement was determined at Tesla headquarters in the US. "Our division possesses a mandate to take independent such decisions," he stated.

IF Metall is not completely isolated in its fight. This industrial action has been supported from several of other unions.

Dockworkers in nearby Scandinavian nations, Norway & Finland, are refusing to handle the company's vehicles; rubbish is not collected from Tesla's Swedish facilities; while recently constructed power points are not being connected to the grid across the nation.

Exists an example near the capital's airport, at which 20 chargers remain unused. However Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, says Tesla owners are unaffected by the strike.

"There exists an alternative power point 10km from here," he comments. "And we can continue to buy our cars, we can maintain our vehicles, we can power our cars."

With consequences high for all parties, it's hard to envision an end to the stand-off. IF Metall faces the danger of setting a precedent should it surrender the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

"The worry is how this could expand," states the researcher, "and eventually {erode