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Across Sweden, around seventy car technicians persist to confront among the world's wealthiest corporations – Tesla. This industrial action at the American carmaker's ten Swedish repair facilities has now entered its second anniversary, with little indication for a resolution.

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

"It has been a difficult period," states the 39-year-old. With Sweden's cold winter weather arrives, it is expected to become more challenging.

The mechanic devotes each Monday alongside a colleague, standing outside an electric vehicle garage on a business district located in southern Sweden. His union, IF Metall, provides shelter in the form of a mobile builders' van, as well as hot beverages and sandwiches.

However it remains business as usual nearby, at which the service facility seems to operate at full capacity.

This industrial action concerns an issue that goes to the core of Scandinavia's industrial culture – the right for worker organizations to bargain for wages & conditions representing their workforce. This principle of negotiated labor contracts has underpinned labor dynamics across the nation for almost a century.

Today some seventy percent of Swedish workers are members to labor organizations, while 90% are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes in Sweden occur infrequently.

It's an arrangement supported across the board. "We prefer the ability to bargain freely with the unions and establish collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses employer group.

However Tesla has upset established practices. Outspoken chief executive the company leader has said he "opposes" with the idea of unions. "I simply disapprove of any arrangement which creates a kind of lords and peasants situation," he informed an audience at an event in 2023. "In my view the unions attempt to generate conflict in a company."

The automaker entered the Scandinavian market starting in the mid-2010s, and IF Metall has long sought to secure a collective agreement with the automaker.

"Yet they wouldn't respond," says Marie Nilsson, the union's leader. "And we got the impression that they tried to hide away or not discuss this with us."

She says the organization ultimately saw no alternative except to call a strike, which started in late October, 2023. "Usually it's enough to make the threat," says Ms Nilsson. "The company usually agrees to the contract."

However this did not happen in this case.

Janis Kuzma, originally of Latvian origin, began employment for Tesla in 2021. He claims that wages and work terms were often subject to the whim of managers.

He remembers an evaluation meeting at which he says he was refused a salary increase because that he "failing to meet Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a colleague was said to be rejected for a pay rise due to having the "wrong attitude".

However, not everyone went out on strike. The company had some one hundred thirty technicians employed at the time the industrial action was called. The union says currently approximately seventy of its members are participating in the action.

The automaker has since replaced the striking workers with replacement staff, a situation there is no precedent since the era of the Great Depression.

"The company has accomplished this [found replacement staff] publicly & systematically," states German Bender, an analyst at Arena Idé, a think tank supported by Swedish trade unions.

"It's not illegal, which is important to recognize. But it violates all traditional norms. But Tesla doesn't care for conventions.

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

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

In fact, the company has given only one press discussion during the entire period after the industrial action started.

In March 2024, the Swedish subsidiary's "country lead", the executive, informed a business paper that it suited the company more to avoid a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with employees and give them optimal conditions".

The executive rejected that the choice to avoid a labor contract was one made by US leadership overseas. "Our division possesses authorization to make our own such decisions," he said.

The union is not completely alone in this conflict. This industrial action has received backing by a number of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in nearby Scandinavian nations, Norway and neighboring states, are refusing to process the company's vehicles; waste is no longer removed from Tesla's Swedish facilities; while newly built power points are not being linked to power networks in the country.

Exists an example near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which 20 charging units remain unused. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, says vehicle owners remain unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's an alternative power point six miles from here," he comments. "And we can still buy our cars, we can maintain our cars, we can charge our cars."

With consequences high for all parties, it is difficult to envision an end to the deadlock. The union risks setting a precedent should it surrender the fundamental concept of collective agreement.

"The concern is how that would spread," states Mr Bender, "and eventually {erode