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Across Sweden, around 70 automotive mechanics persist to challenge one of the globe's wealthiest corporations – Tesla. This labor strike at the American carmaker's 10 Swedish service centers has currently reached its second anniversary, and there is minimal sign of a resolution.

One striking worker has remained at the Tesla protest line starting from October 2023.

"It's a tough time," states the 39-year-old. And as Sweden's cold winter weather arrives, it is expected to grow even tougher.

Janis devotes each Monday with a fellow worker, standing outside an electric vehicle garage on a business district in Malmö. The labor organization, the Swedish metalworkers' union, provides accommodation in the form of a mobile builders' van, as well as hot beverages and light meals.

However it's operations continue normally across the road, where the service facility seems to be in full swing.

This industrial action concerns an issue that goes to the core of Swedish industrial culture – the authority of trade unions to bargain for pay and working terms on behalf of their workforce. This concept of collective agreement has underpinned industrial relations across the nation for almost one hundred years.

Currently some seventy percent of Scandinavia's workers belong of a trade union, and 90% fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Labor stoppages across the nation occur infrequently.

This is a system welcomed by all parties. "We favor the ability to negotiate directly with worker representatives and establish labor contracts," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses employer group.

However Tesla has disrupted the apple cart. Vocal chief executive the company leader has said he "disagrees" with the concept of unions. "I simply disapprove of any arrangement which creates a sort of hierarchical sort of thing," he told listeners in New York in 2023. "In my view the unions attempt to generate negativity in a company."

The automaker entered the Scandinavian market back in 2014, while the metalworkers' union has long wanted to establish a labor contract with the automaker.

"Yet they did not reply," says the union president, the organization's president. "And we got the impression that they attempted to hide away or evade discussing this with our representatives."

She states the organization eventually saw no alternative except to announce a strike, beginning on 27 October, 2023. "Usually the threat suffices to make the threat," comments the union leader. "The company typically signs the contract."

But not in this case.

Janis Kuzma, originally of Latvian origin, began employment with the automaker in 2021. He asserts that wages and work terms frequently subject to the discretion of supervisors.

He recalls an evaluation meeting at which he says he was denied a salary increase on grounds that he "not reaching company targets". At the same time, a coworker was said to have been rejected for a pay rise due to he had the "wrong attitude".

However, some workers went out on strike. The company had approximately one hundred thirty mechanics working when the industrial action was called. The union states currently approximately seventy of its members are on strike.

The automaker has since substituted these with replacement staff, a situation that has no precedent since the era of the Great Depression.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] publicly & methodically," states a labor researcher, a researcher at Arena Idé, a policy organization financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It's not against the law, which is important to understand. But it violates all established practices. But the company shows no concern about norms.

"They aim to become norm breakers. Thus when anyone informs them, listen, you are breaking a standard, they perceive this as praise."

The company's local division declined attempts for comment in an email mentioning "record vehicle shipments".

In fact, the company has given just a single media interview during the entire period after the industrial action began.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, the executive, informed a business paper that it benefited the organization more not to have a union contract, and rather "to work closely with employees and provide them optimal terms".

The executive denied that the choice to avoid a collective agreement was determined at Tesla headquarters overseas. "We have authorization to make independent such choices," he said.

The union is not completely isolated in its fight. This industrial action has received backing from several of other unions.

Port workers in nearby Denmark, Norway and Finland, decline to handle the company's vehicles; waste is not collected from the automaker's Swedish facilities; and newly built charging stations are not being connected to the grid across the nation.

Exists one such facility near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where twenty chargers remain unused. But a Tesla enthusiast, the president of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, states Tesla owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists another charging station six miles from here," he comments. "Plus we are able to still buy our cars, we can maintain our vehicles, we can power our electric cars."

With consequences high for all parties, it's hard to envision an end to the deadlock. The union faces the danger of setting a precedent should it surrender the principle of collective agreement.

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