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In Sweden, around 70 automotive technicians continue to challenge among the globe's richest companies – the electric vehicle manufacturer. This industrial action targeting the American carmaker's 10 Swedish repair facilities has currently reached its second anniversary, with minimal sign of a settlement.

One striking worker has been on the electric car company's protest line starting from October 2023.

"It's a difficult period," states the worker in his late thirties. With Sweden's cold winter weather sets in, it's likely to become even tougher.

The mechanic devotes each Monday with a colleague, standing near a Tesla garage on an industrial park located in southern Sweden. His union, IF Metall, supplies shelter via a portable construction vehicle, as well as coffee & sandwiches.

But it's operations continue normally across the road, where the service facility appears to be at full capacity.

The strike concerns an issue that reaches to the core of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the right for worker organizations to negotiate wages & conditions representing their members. This concept of collective agreement has supported labor dynamics in Sweden for almost one hundred years.

Currently some seventy percent of Swedish employees belong to labor organizations, while 90% fall under by a collective agreement. Labor stoppages across the nation are rare.

It's a system welcomed by all parties. "We prefer the right to negotiate freely with the unions and establish labor contracts," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise employer group.

However Tesla has disrupted the apple cart. Outspoken CEO the company leader has stated he "disagrees" with the concept of labor organizations. "I just disapprove of anything that establishes a sort of lords and peasants sort of thing," he told an audience in New York last year. "I think labor groups try to create negativity within businesses."

The automaker entered the Scandinavian market back in the mid-2010s, and IF Metall has for years wanted to secure a labor contract with the automaker.

"Yet they wouldn't reply," states the union president, the union's president. "And we got the belief that they attempted to hide away or evade discussing the matter with our representatives."

She says the organization ultimately found no other option than to announce a strike, beginning in late October, 2023. "Usually it's enough to issue the threat," comments the union leader. "Employers typically signs the agreement."

However this did not happen on this occasion.

Janis Kuzma, originally of Latvian origin, started working for Tesla in 2021. He asserts that pay & work terms were often dependent on the discretion of supervisors.

He recalls a performance review at which he states he was refused an annual pay rise on grounds that he "failing to meet company targets". At the same time, a colleague was said to be turned down for a pay rise because having an "inappropriate demeanor".

However, not everyone went out on strike. Tesla employed some 130 technicians employed when the industrial action was called. IF Metall says currently around seventy of its members are participating in the action.

Tesla has since replaced the striking workers with new workers, for which that has not occurred since the 1930s.

"Tesla has accomplished this [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 against the law, this being important to recognize. But it goes against all established norms. But Tesla shows no concern for conventions.

"They want to become norm breakers. Thus when anyone tells them, hey, you are violating a standard, they perceive that as praise."

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary declined requests for comment via correspondence citing "all-time high vehicle shipments".

Indeed, the company has granted just a single press discussion in the two years after the strike began.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, the executive, told a financial publication that it benefited the organization better not to have a collective agreement, and rather "to work closely with employees and give workers optimal conditions".

The executive rejected that the decision to avoid a collective agreement was determined by US leadership in the US. "We have a mandate to make our own such choices," he stated.

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

Dockworkers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Norway & Finland, decline to process Teslas; waste is no longer collected from Tesla's Swedish facilities; and newly built charging stations remain connected to power networks across the nation.

There is an example near the capital's airport, at which 20 charging units stand idle. However Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, says vehicle owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists an alternative power point 10km from here," he comments. "And we can still buy our cars, we can service our cars, we can power our electric cars."

With stakes high for all parties, it is difficult to envision an end to the stand-off. IF Metall 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 Mr Bender, "and eventually {erode