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In Sweden, around seventy car technicians persist to challenge among the globe's richest corporations – Tesla. This labor strike targeting the American automaker's ten Swedish service centers has currently reached its second anniversary, with minimal sign for a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been at the electric car company's protest line since October 2023.

"It has been a tough period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. With Sweden's cold winter weather arrives, it's likely to grow more challenging.

Janis devotes each Monday with a colleague, standing near a Tesla service center within an industrial park in Malmö. The labor organization, IF Metall, provides shelter via a mobile construction vehicle, as well as hot beverages & sandwiches.

However it remains business as usual across the road, at which the workshop seems to operate at full capacity.

The strike involves an issue that goes to the core of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority for worker organizations to negotiate wages and conditions on behalf of their members. This principle of negotiated labor contracts has underpinned industrial relations in Sweden for nearly a century.

Today some seventy percent of Swedish employees are members of a trade union, while 90% are covered by a collective agreement. Strikes across the nation occur infrequently.

It's an arrangement welcomed by all parties. "We prefer the right to negotiate freely with the unions and sign labor contracts," states a business representative from the Association of Swedish Businesses business organization.

However the electric car company has upset established practices. Vocal chief executive Elon Musk has said he "opposes" with the idea of unions. "I simply don't like any arrangement that establishes a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he told listeners in New York in 2023. "I think labor groups attempt to create negativity in a company."

The automaker came to Sweden starting in 2014, and the metalworkers' union has long wanted to establish a collective agreement with the automaker.

"But they did not respond," says Marie Nilsson, the organization's president. "We formed the impression that they tried to avoid or evade discussing the matter with us."

She states the union ultimately saw no alternative except to announce a strike, beginning in late October, last year. "Usually the threat suffices to issue the threat," says the union leader. "Employers usually agrees to the contract."

However this did not happen in this case.

The striking mechanic, originally from Latvia, began employment with the automaker several years ago. He asserts that pay & work terms frequently subject to the whim of managers.

He remembers an evaluation meeting at which he states he was refused a salary increase on grounds he was "failing to meet company targets". Meanwhile, a colleague was reported to have been turned down for a pay rise because having the "wrong attitude".

However, some workers participated in the industrial action. Tesla had some one hundred thirty technicians employed when the strike was initiated. The union says that today approximately seventy of its members are participating in the action.

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

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] publicly & methodically," says a labor researcher, a researcher at Arena Idé, a think tank supported by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It's not illegal, which is crucial to understand. However it goes against all traditional practices. Yet the company doesn't care about norms.

"They aim to become convention challengers. So if anyone informs them, listen, you are breaking a standard, they see this as a compliment."

The company's local division refused requests for interview in an email mentioning "all-time high vehicle shipments".

In fact, the company has given only one media interview during the entire period since the strike started.

In March 2024, the local division's "country lead", the executive, informed a business paper that it benefited the organization better to avoid a collective agreement, and instead "to collaborate directly with the team and provide them optimal terms".

Mr Stark denied that the decision not to enter a labor contract was one made by US leadership overseas. "Our division possesses authorization to take independent such decisions," he said.

The union is not entirely alone in this conflict. This industrial action has received backing by a number of other unions.

Dockworkers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Norway and neighboring states, are refusing to process Teslas; waste is not removed from the automaker's Scandinavian locations; while newly built power points are not being linked to power networks in the country.

Exists an example near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which twenty chargers stand idle. However a Tesla enthusiast, the leader of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, says vehicle owners remain unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's another charging station 10km from this location," he comments. "And we can continue to purchase vehicles, we can service our cars, we can charge our cars."

With consequences significant for all parties, it is difficult to envision a resolution to the stand-off. The union faces the danger of setting a precedent should it surrender the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

"The concern is how this could expand," states Mr Bender, "and ultimately {erode