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In Sweden, around seventy automotive technicians continue to challenge among the world's richest companies – the electric vehicle manufacturer. This industrial action at the American carmaker's ten Swedish repair facilities has now entered two years of duration, and there is little indication of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been at the electric car company's picket line since the autumn of 2023.

"It has been a difficult period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. And as the nation's chilly winter weather sets in, it is expected to grow more challenging.

Janis devotes every start of the week with a colleague, positioned near an electric vehicle garage on a business district in Malmö. The labor organization, IF Metall, provides shelter in the form of a mobile construction vehicle, plus hot beverages & light meals.

However it's business as usual nearby, at which the workshop seems to be in full swing.

This industrial action involves a matter that reaches to the core of Scandinavia's industrial culture – the right for worker organizations to negotiate pay and working terms representing their members. This principle of collective agreement has supported labor dynamics across the nation for almost a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Scandinavia's employees belong to labor organizations, and ninety percent are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Labor stoppages across the nation are rare.

This is an arrangement supported by all parties. "We favor the ability to bargain directly with worker representatives and sign collective agreements," says a business representative from the Association of Swedish Businesses business organization.

However Tesla has disrupted the apple cart. Vocal CEO the company leader has stated he "disagrees" with the concept of labor organizations. "I simply don't like any arrangement which creates a kind of hierarchical sort of thing," he informed listeners at an event last year. "In my view labor groups attempt to create negativity in a company."

The automaker entered the Scandinavian market back in the mid-2010s, while the metalworkers' union has long sought to establish a labor contract with the automaker.

"But they wouldn't respond," says the union president, the union's leader. "And we got the impression that they attempted to avoid or not discuss the matter with our representatives."

She says the organization eventually saw no alternative than to call a strike, beginning in late October, last year. "Usually it's enough to make a warning," says the union leader. "The company typically agrees to the agreement."

However this did not happen on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, began employment with the automaker in 2021. He claims that pay and conditions were often dependent on the discretion of supervisors.

He remembers an evaluation meeting at which he says he was denied a salary increase because that he "not reaching company targets". At the same time, a colleague was reported to have been rejected for a pay rise because having the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, some workers went out in the industrial action. The company employed some one hundred thirty mechanics employed when the strike was initiated. The union says that today around seventy of its members are participating in the action.

The automaker has long since substituted the striking workers with replacement staff, a situation there is not occurred since the era of the Great Depression.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] publicly and systematically," states German Bender, a researcher at Arena Idé, a policy organization financed by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not against the law, which is crucial to recognize. But it goes against all established norms. But Tesla doesn't care about norms.

"They want to become convention challengers. So if anyone informs them, listen, you are violating a standard, they perceive that as praise."

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

In fact, the company has given just a single media interview in the two years after the strike started.

Earlier this year, the Swedish subsidiary's "national manager, the executive, told a financial publication that it benefited the company more to avoid a union contract, and instead "to collaborate directly with employees and give them optimal terms".

The executive denied that the choice to avoid a collective agreement was one made by US leadership in the US. "We have authorization to make our own such decisions," 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 nearby Denmark, Nordic countries & Finland, are refusing to handle the company's vehicles; rubbish is not collected from the automaker's Scandinavian locations; while newly built power points remain linked to the grid across the nation.

There is an example close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which twenty charging units remain unused. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, states Tesla owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's an alternative power point six miles from here," he comments. "And we can continue to purchase vehicles, we can service our cars, we can power our cars."

With consequences significant on both sides, it's hard to envision an end to the deadlock. IF Metall risks setting a precedent should it surrender the fundamental concept of collective agreement.

"The worry is how this could expand," says Mr Bender, "and ultimately {erode