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Across Sweden, approximately seventy automotive technicians continue to confront among the world's richest companies – the electric vehicle manufacturer. This industrial action targeting the American automaker's ten Scandinavian service centers has currently entered two years of duration, with little indication of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been on the electric car company's protest line starting from October 2023.

"It's a difficult period," states the 39-year-old. And as the nation's cold seasonal conditions sets in, it is expected to become even tougher.

Janis devotes every start of the week with a fellow worker, positioned near an electric vehicle garage within a business district located in southern Sweden. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies accommodation via a mobile builders' van, as well as coffee & light meals.

But it's operations continue normally nearby, where the workshop appears to operate in full swing.

This industrial action concerns an issue that goes to the heart of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority of trade unions to negotiate pay and working terms on behalf of their members. This principle of collective agreement has supported labor dynamics across the nation for almost one hundred years.

Today some 70% of Swedish employees belong of a trade union, and ninety percent fall under by a collective agreement. Labor stoppages in Sweden occur infrequently.

This is a system supported across the board. "We prefer the right to negotiate directly with the unions and sign labor contracts," states Mattias Dahl from the Association of Swedish Enterprise employer group.

But the electric car company has upset established practices. Outspoken chief executive Elon Musk has stated he "disagrees" with the concept of unions. "I simply don't like any arrangement that establishes a kind of lords and peasants situation," he informed an audience in New York last year. "I think the unions attempt to generate negativity within businesses."

The automaker came to the Scandinavian market back in the mid-2010s, and the metalworkers' union has long wanted to secure a labor contract with the company.

"But they did not reply," says the union president, the union's president. "We formed the belief that they tried to hide away or not discuss this with us."

She says the union eventually saw no alternative except to call a strike, beginning on 27 October, last year. "Typically the threat suffices to make a warning," comments the union leader. "The company usually agrees to the contract."

However this did not happen on this occasion.

Janis Kuzma, who is of Latvian origin, started working for Tesla in 2021. He asserts that wages and work terms frequently dependent on the discretion of managers.

He recalls an evaluation meeting at which he says he was denied an annual pay rise because he was "failing to meet Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a colleague was reported to have been rejected for a pay rise due to he had the "wrong attitude".

However, not everyone participated in the industrial action. Tesla had some one hundred thirty mechanics employed when the industrial action was initiated. IF Metall says currently around 70 of their represented workers are on strike.

Tesla has long since replaced these with replacement staff, a situation there is no precedent since the 1930s.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] openly and methodically," states a labor researcher, a researcher at a research institute, a think tank financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It's not against the law, this being important to recognize. But it violates all established norms. Yet Tesla doesn't care for conventions.

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

The company's Swedish subsidiary declined attempts for interview in an email mentioning "all-time high deliveries".

In fact, the company has given just a single media interview in the two years after the industrial action began.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, Jens Stark, informed a business paper that it suited the organization more to avoid a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with the team and give them the best possible terms".

The executive rejected that the decision to avoid a collective agreement was determined at Tesla headquarters in the US. "Our division possesses a mandate to make independent such decisions," he stated.

The union is not completely alone in its fight. This industrial action has been supported from several of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Norway & Finland, decline to handle the company's vehicles; rubbish is no longer collected from the automaker's Swedish facilities; and newly built charging stations remain linked to power networks in the country.

Exists one such facility close to the capital's airport, where twenty chargers stand idle. However Tibor Blomhäll, the leader of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, states vehicle owners remain unaffected by the strike.

"There's an alternative power point six miles from this location," he says. "And we can still buy our cars, we can maintain our cars, we can power our electric cars."

With consequences significant for all parties, it is difficult to envision an end to the stand-off. IF Metall risks setting a precedent should it surrender the fundamental concept of negotiated labor contracts.

"The concern is how this could expand," states the researcher, "and ultimately {erode