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Across Sweden, around seventy car technicians continue to challenge one of the world's wealthiest corporations – Tesla. This industrial action targeting the US automaker's ten Swedish service centers has now reached two years of duration, with minimal sign for a settlement.

Janis Kuzma has been on the Tesla picket line since October 2023.

"It has been a difficult period," states the 39-year-old. With Sweden's chilly winter weather arrives, it is expected to grow even tougher.

Janis devotes every start of the week alongside a fellow worker, positioned near an electric vehicle garage on a business district in Malmö. The labor organization, IF Metall, supplies shelter via a mobile construction vehicle, plus coffee & light meals.

However it's business as usual across the road, where the service facility appears to be in full swing.

This industrial action involves a matter that reaches to the heart of Scandinavia's industrial culture – the authority for worker organizations to bargain for pay and conditions on behalf of their members. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has underpinned labor dynamics across the nation for almost a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Scandinavia's workers are members of a trade union, and 90% are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes in Sweden are rare.

This is an arrangement supported by all parties. "We prefer the ability to negotiate directly with the unions and establish labor contracts," says Mattias Dahl from the Association of Swedish Enterprise employer group.

But the electric car company has upset the apple cart. Vocal chief executive Elon Musk has said he "disagrees" with the idea of unions. "I just disapprove of anything which creates a sort of hierarchical situation," he told listeners at an event in 2023. "I think the unions attempt to generate negativity within businesses."

Tesla entered Sweden starting in the mid-2010s, while IF Metall has long wanted to secure a labor contract with the automaker.

"Yet they did not respond," states the union president, the union's leader. "We formed the impression that they attempted to hide away or evade discussing the matter with our representatives."

She states the organization eventually saw no other option except to announce industrial action, which started on 27 October, last year. "Usually the threat suffices to make the threat," comments Ms Nilsson. "The company typically signs the agreement."

However this did not happen in this case.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, started working for Tesla in 2021. He claims that wages & work terms were often dependent on the whim of managers.

He remembers an evaluation meeting at which he states he was denied an annual pay rise because he was "not reaching Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a colleague was said to be turned down for a pay rise because having the "wrong attitude".

However, some workers went out on strike. Tesla had approximately one hundred thirty mechanics employed at the time the strike was called. IF Metall says that today approximately seventy of their represented workers are participating in the action.

The automaker has since substituted these with replacement staff, a situation that has not occurred since the Great Depression.

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] publicly and systematically," states a labor researcher, an analyst at a research institute, a think tank supported by Swedish trade unions.

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

"They aim to become convention challengers. So if anyone tells them, listen, you are breaking a norm, they see that as a compliment."

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary refused attempts for interview in an email mentioning "all-time high vehicle shipments".

In fact, the automaker has granted only one media interview in the two years after the strike started.

In March 2024, the Swedish subsidiary's "national manager, the executive, told a business paper that it benefited the organization better not to have a collective agreement, and rather "to work closely with employees and provide them the best possible terms".

The executive rejected that the decision not to enter a collective agreement was determined by US leadership overseas. "We have authorization to take our own such decisions," he stated.

The union is not completely isolated in this conflict. This industrial action has been supported from several of other unions.

Port workers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Nordic countries and neighboring states, decline to handle the company's vehicles; waste is not removed from the automaker's Scandinavian locations; and newly built charging stations are not being linked to power networks across the nation.

Exists one such facility near the capital's airport, where 20 charging units stand idle. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, states vehicle owners remain unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists an alternative power point 10km from this location," he says. "Plus we are able to still buy our cars, we can maintain our cars, we can power our cars."

With consequences significant on both sides, it is difficult to envision an end to the deadlock. IF Metall faces the danger of establishing a pattern if it concedes the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

"The worry is how this could expand," states the researcher, "and eventually {erode