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Across Sweden, approximately seventy car mechanics persist to challenge among the globe's wealthiest corporations – the electric vehicle manufacturer. The industrial action targeting the American carmaker's 10 Scandinavian repair facilities has now reached two years of duration, and there is minimal sign of a settlement.

Janis Kuzma has been at the Tesla protest line starting from October 2023.

"It's a tough period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. With the nation's chilly winter weather sets in, it is expected to grow even tougher.

The mechanic devotes every start of the week alongside a colleague, standing outside a Tesla service center on an industrial park in Malmö. The labor organization, IF Metall, supplies shelter in the form of a mobile builders' van, as well as coffee and light meals.

However it remains business as usual across the road, where the service facility appears to be at full capacity.

The strike involves an issue that goes to the heart of Swedish industrial culture – the authority of trade unions to bargain for pay & working terms representing their members. This principle of collective agreement has supported industrial relations in Sweden for almost a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Scandinavia's workers are members of a trade union, and ninety percent are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Labor stoppages across the nation are rare.

It's an arrangement welcomed by all parties. "We prefer the right to negotiate directly with worker representatives and sign labor contracts," states a business representative of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses business organization.

But Tesla has disrupted established practices. Outspoken CEO Elon Musk has said he "opposes" with the concept of unions. "I just disapprove of anything which creates a kind of lords and peasants situation," he informed an audience at an event in 2023. "I think labor groups try to generate conflict in a company."

Tesla entered Sweden back in the mid-2010s, while IF Metall has long sought to establish a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they wouldn't respond," says Marie Nilsson, the organization's president. "We formed the belief that they attempted to hide away or evade discussing this with us."

She states the organization ultimately found no alternative than to announce industrial action, which started in late October, last year. "Usually it's enough to issue the threat," says Ms Nilsson. "Employers usually agrees to the contract."

But not on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, started working with the automaker in 2021. He claims that pay & conditions frequently dependent on the whim of managers.

He recalls a performance review at which he says he was denied a salary increase on grounds that he "not reaching company targets". Meanwhile, a colleague was reported to have been turned down for increased compensation due to he had an "inappropriate demeanor".

Nevertheless, some workers participated in the industrial action. Tesla had approximately one hundred thirty technicians employed at the time the strike was called. The union says currently around 70 of their represented workers are on strike.

Tesla has since substituted the striking workers with new workers, for which there is no precedent since the 1930s.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] publicly and systematically," states German Bender, a researcher at a research institute, a policy organization financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It is not against the law, which is important to recognize. However it violates all established norms. But the company shows no concern about norms.

"They want to become convention challengers. Thus when anyone tells them, listen, you are violating a norm, they see that as a compliment."

The company's local division refused attempts for interview via correspondence mentioning "record deliveries".

In fact, the company has granted just a single press discussion in the two years since the strike began.

In March 2024, the Swedish subsidiary's "country lead", Jens Stark, informed a business paper that it suited the company better not to have a union contract, and instead "to collaborate directly with employees and provide them optimal conditions".

The executive denied that the choice to avoid a collective agreement was one made at Tesla headquarters overseas. "Our division possesses authorization to make independent such decisions," he stated.

IF Metall is not completely alone in its fight. The strike has been supported from several of other unions.

Port workers in nearby Denmark, Nordic countries and neighboring states, decline to handle Teslas; waste is not collected from Tesla's Swedish facilities; while newly built charging stations are not being connected to power networks across the nation.

Exists one such facility near the capital's airport, at which twenty charging units remain unused. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, says vehicle owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's another charging station six miles from here," he says. "And we can continue to buy our cars, we can maintain our cars, we can charge our cars."

With consequences significant on both sides, it is difficult to envision a resolution to the deadlock. IF Metall risks setting a precedent should it surrender the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

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