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Across Sweden, approximately 70 car technicians continue to confront one of the globe's wealthiest corporations – the electric vehicle manufacturer. The labor strike targeting the US carmaker's ten Swedish service centers has now reached two years of duration, and there is little sign for a resolution.

One striking worker has remained on the electric car company's protest line starting from the autumn of 2023.

"It has been a tough period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. With Sweden's cold seasonal conditions sets in, it is expected to become even tougher.

The mechanic spends each Monday with a fellow worker, standing outside a Tesla garage within a business district in Malmö. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, provides shelter in the form of a portable builders' van, plus coffee and light meals.

However it remains operations continue normally across the road, where the service facility seems to operate in full swing.

This industrial action involves an issue that reaches to the heart of Swedish industrial culture – the authority for worker organizations to bargain for wages & conditions representing their workforce. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has underpinned industrial relations in Sweden for almost a century.

Currently some seventy percent of Scandinavia's workers belong of a trade union, while 90% are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Labor stoppages in Sweden occur infrequently.

It's an arrangement welcomed by all parties. "We favor the right to negotiate freely with worker representatives and establish collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl from the Association of Swedish Businesses employer group.

But Tesla has upset the apple cart. Vocal CEO the company leader has stated he "disagrees" with the idea of labor organizations. "I just don't like anything which creates a kind of lords and peasants situation," he informed an audience in New York last year. "In my view labor groups attempt to create negativity within businesses."

The automaker entered the Scandinavian market starting in the mid-2010s, and the metalworkers' union has long sought to establish a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they did not reply," says Marie Nilsson, the organization's president. "We formed the impression that they tried to avoid or evade discussing the matter with our representatives."

She states the union eventually found no other option except to announce industrial action, which started on 27 October, 2023. "Usually it's enough to make a warning," says the union leader. "The company usually agrees to the agreement."

However not in this case.

Janis Kuzma, who is from Latvia, started working for Tesla several years ago. He asserts that wages and conditions frequently subject to the discretion of supervisors.

He recalls a performance review at which he says he was denied a salary increase because that he "not reaching Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a colleague was said to have been turned down for a pay rise because he had an "inappropriate demeanor".

However, not everyone went out in the industrial action. The company employed some 130 mechanics working at the time the strike was called. IF Metall states that today around 70 of its members are on strike.

The automaker has since replaced these with replacement staff, for which there is not occurred since the era of the 1930s.

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

"It is not illegal, which is crucial to recognize. However it violates all established norms. Yet the company shows no concern about norms.

"They want to become convention challengers. Thus when anyone informs them, listen, you are breaking a standard, they see that as a compliment."

The automaker's local division declined requests for interview via correspondence mentioning "all-time high deliveries".

In fact, the company has given just a single media interview in the two years since the industrial action started.

Earlier this year, the local division's "country lead", the executive, told a financial publication that it suited the company better to avoid a union contract, and instead "to work closely with the team and give workers the best possible conditions".

Mr Stark denied that the choice to avoid a labor contract was one made at Tesla headquarters in the US. "We have a mandate to make independent such choices," he stated.

IF Metall is not entirely alone in its fight. The strike has received backing by a number of labor organizations.

Port workers in nearby Scandinavian nations, Nordic countries & neighboring states, are refusing to handle Teslas; rubbish is not removed from the automaker's Scandinavian locations; and recently constructed power points are not being connected to power networks in the country.

There is one such facility near the capital's airport, where twenty chargers stand idle. However a Tesla enthusiast, the president of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, says Tesla owners remain unaffected by the strike.

"There's an alternative power point six miles from this location," he says. "Plus we are able to continue to buy our cars, we can service our cars, we can charge our electric cars."

With stakes significant on both sides, it is difficult to see an end to the stand-off. The union faces the danger of setting a precedent should it surrender the fundamental concept of negotiated labor contracts.

"The worry is that that would spread," says the researcher, "and ultimately {erode