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In Sweden, approximately 70 automotive mechanics continue to challenge one of the globe's wealthiest corporations – Tesla. The industrial action at the American automaker's ten Scandinavian repair facilities has currently entered two years of duration, with minimal sign for a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been at the Tesla picket line since October 2023.

"It's a difficult period," states the worker in his late thirties. With the nation's chilly winter weather arrives, it is expected to become more challenging.

The mechanic spends each Monday with a colleague, positioned near a Tesla garage within an industrial park located in southern Sweden. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies shelter in the form of a portable builders' van, plus hot beverages and sandwiches.

However it's business as usual nearby, where the service facility seems to be in full swing.

This industrial action involves an issue that goes to the heart of Scandinavia's industrial culture – the authority of trade unions to bargain for pay & working terms representing their workforce. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported labor dynamics in Sweden for nearly a century.

Today some 70% of Scandinavia's workers belong to labor organizations, while ninety percent are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes across the nation occur infrequently.

This is an arrangement supported by all parties. "We prefer the right to bargain directly with the unions and sign labor contracts," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses business organization.

But the electric car company has disrupted the apple cart. Outspoken chief executive Elon Musk has said he "disagrees" with the idea of labor organizations. "I just disapprove of any arrangement which creates a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he informed an audience at an event in 2023. "In my view the unions attempt to generate conflict in a company."

Tesla came to Sweden back in 2014, and the metalworkers' union has for years sought to establish a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they did not respond," says the union president, the organization's president. "And we got the impression that they tried to hide away or evade discussing this with our representatives."

She states the organization eventually saw no other option except to announce a strike, which started in late October, last year. "Typically it's enough to issue the threat," comments the union leader. "Employers typically agrees to the contract."

But not on this occasion.

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

He remembers a performance review where 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 turned down for a pay rise because having the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, not everyone participated on strike. The company had approximately one hundred thirty mechanics working when the industrial action was called. The union says currently approximately seventy of their represented workers are participating in the action.

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

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] openly and systematically," states a labor researcher, an analyst at a research institute, a think tank financed by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not illegal, this being crucial to understand. But it violates all established norms. Yet Tesla doesn't care about norms.

"They want to be convention challengers. Thus when anyone tells them, listen, you are violating a standard, they perceive this as praise."

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

In fact, the automaker has given only one press discussion during the entire period after the strike started.

Earlier this year, the local division's "national manager, Jens Stark, told a financial publication that it suited the organization more to avoid a union contract, and instead "to collaborate directly with the team and give workers optimal conditions".

The executive rejected that the decision not to enter a labor contract was determined at Tesla headquarters in the US. "Our division possesses authorization to take our own such choices," he stated.

The union is not entirely isolated in this conflict. This industrial action has been supported by a number of other unions.

Dockworkers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Nordic countries and neighboring states, decline to handle Teslas; rubbish is no longer collected from Tesla's Scandinavian locations; and recently constructed power points remain linked to the grid across the nation.

There is an example close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which twenty charging units remain unused. However a Tesla enthusiast, the leader of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, states vehicle owners remain unaffected by the strike.

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

With consequences high on both sides, it is difficult to envision a resolution to the stand-off. IF Metall faces the danger of setting a precedent should it surrender the principle of collective agreement.

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