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In Sweden, around seventy automotive mechanics continue to challenge among the globe's wealthiest corporations – Tesla. This labor strike at the US carmaker's 10 Scandinavian service centers has currently entered two years of duration, and there is little indication for a settlement.

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

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

Janis spends each Monday alongside a colleague, standing outside a Tesla service center on a business district in Malmö. His union, IF Metall, provides accommodation via a portable builders' van, as well as coffee & light meals.

However it's operations continue normally across the road, at which the workshop appears to operate at full capacity.

This industrial action concerns an issue that reaches to the core of Scandinavia's industrial culture – the right of trade unions to negotiate pay & working terms on behalf of their members. This concept of collective agreement has underpinned labor dynamics across the nation for almost a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Swedish employees belong of a trade union, while 90% are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes across the nation occur infrequently.

This is an arrangement welcomed by all parties. "We prefer the ability to negotiate freely with worker representatives and establish labor contracts," says a business representative from the Association of Swedish Businesses business organization.

But Tesla has upset the apple cart. Outspoken CEO Elon Musk has said he "disagrees" with the concept of unions. "I just disapprove of anything that establishes a sort of lords and peasants situation," he informed an audience in New York last year. "I think the unions try to create conflict within businesses."

Tesla entered Sweden back in 2014, while IF Metall has long wanted to secure a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they did not reply," says Marie Nilsson, the organization's leader. "We formed the impression that they tried to hide away or not discuss the matter with us."

She says the organization eventually saw no alternative except to call industrial action, which started in late October, 2023. "Usually the threat suffices to make the threat," says the union leader. "The company typically signs the agreement."

But this did not happen in this case.

The striking mechanic, who is from Latvia, started working for Tesla several years ago. He claims that wages & work terms were often subject to the discretion of managers.

He recalls a performance review where he says he was refused an annual pay rise because that he "failing to meet company targets". At the same time, a colleague was reported to be rejected for increased compensation due to he had the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, some workers participated on strike. The company employed approximately one hundred thirty technicians employed at the time the industrial action was called. The union says currently approximately 70 of its members are participating in the action.

Tesla has since replaced the striking workers with new workers, for which that has no precedent since the era of the 1930s.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] publicly & systematically," says German Bender, a researcher at a research institute, a think tank supported by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It's not against the law, this being crucial to understand. However it goes against all established norms. Yet the company shows no concern for conventions.

"They aim to become norm breakers. So if somebody informs them, listen, you are violating a standard, they perceive that as praise."

The company's Swedish subsidiary declined attempts for comment in an email citing "record deliveries".

Indeed, the automaker has granted just a single press discussion in the two years since the industrial action began.

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

Mr Stark denied that the choice to avoid a collective agreement was determined at Tesla headquarters in the US. "We have authorization to make independent such decisions," 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 nearby Denmark, Nordic countries and Finland, are refusing to handle Teslas; 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 charging units remain unused. However Tibor Blomhäll, the president of enthusiasts group Tesla Club Sweden, states vehicle owners are unaffected by the strike.

"There's an alternative power point six miles from this location," he says. "Plus we are able to still purchase vehicles, we can maintain our cars, we can power our electric cars."

With consequences significant for all parties, it's hard to envision an end to the deadlock. The union faces the danger of establishing a pattern should it surrender the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

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