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In Sweden, approximately 70 car technicians continue to challenge among the world's richest corporations – Tesla. This labor strike at the American automaker's 10 Swedish repair facilities has currently reached two years of duration, with minimal sign for a settlement.

One striking worker has been at the Tesla picket line starting from the autumn of 2023.

"It's a difficult time," remarks the worker in his late thirties. And as Sweden's cold winter weather arrives, it is expected to grow more challenging.

Janis spends each Monday with a colleague, standing near a Tesla service center within a business district located in southern Sweden. The labor organization, IF Metall, provides accommodation via a portable builders' van, plus coffee and light meals.

However it's business as usual nearby, 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 bargain for pay and working terms representing their workforce. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported labor dynamics in Sweden for nearly a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Swedish workers belong to labor organizations, and ninety percent are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes across the nation occur infrequently.

This is a system welcomed across the board. "We favor the right to negotiate directly with worker representatives and establish labor contracts," states a business representative from the Association of Swedish Enterprise employer group.

However the electric car company has disrupted established practices. Vocal chief executive Elon Musk has stated he "disagrees" with the idea of labor organizations. "I simply don't like anything which creates a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he informed an audience in New York in 2023. "I think labor groups try to generate negativity in a company."

The automaker came to the Scandinavian market back in 2014, while the metalworkers' union has long wanted to establish a collective agreement with the automaker.

"But they wouldn't respond," states Marie Nilsson, the union's leader. "And we got the impression that they tried to avoid or evade discussing the matter with us."

She says the union ultimately found no other option except to announce industrial action, beginning in late October, last year. "Typically it's enough to issue a warning," says the union leader. "The company typically signs the agreement."

However not on this occasion.

Janis Kuzma, who is from Latvia, started working for Tesla several years ago. He claims that pay & conditions were often dependent on the discretion of managers.

He recalls an evaluation meeting where he states he was refused an annual pay rise because that he "failing to meet Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a colleague was reported to be turned down for increased compensation because having an "inappropriate demeanor".

However, some workers went out in the industrial action. Tesla employed approximately one hundred thirty mechanics working when the industrial action was called. The union says that today approximately seventy of their represented workers are on strike.

The automaker has since replaced these with replacement staff, a situation there is not occurred since the 1930s.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] publicly & methodically," states a labor researcher, 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 established practices. Yet Tesla doesn't care about norms.

"They want to be convention challengers. Thus when anyone tells them, listen, you are violating a standard, they perceive that as a compliment."

The company's local division refused attempts for interview via correspondence citing "record vehicle shipments".

Indeed, the automaker has granted only one media interview during the entire period after the strike began.

Earlier this year, the local division's "national manager, Jens Stark, informed a business paper that it suited the organization more to avoid a collective agreement, and instead "to collaborate directly with the team and provide workers the best possible terms".

The executive rejected that the decision not to enter a labor contract was one made by US leadership in the US. "We have a mandate to take our own such decisions," he said.

IF Metall is not entirely alone in this conflict. This industrial action has received backing by a number of labor organizations.

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

Exists an example near the capital's airport, where twenty charging units stand idle. But a Tesla enthusiast, the leader 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 comments. "And we can still purchase vehicles, 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. The union faces the danger of establishing a pattern should it surrender the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

"The worry is that this could expand," says the researcher, "and eventually {erode