🔗 Share this article

Across Sweden, approximately seventy car mechanics persist to challenge one of the world's wealthiest companies – Tesla. This labor strike at the American automaker's ten Swedish repair facilities has now reached its second anniversary, with minimal sign of a resolution.

One striking worker has been on the Tesla protest line starting from the autumn of 2023.

"It has been a tough period," states the 39-year-old. And as Sweden's chilly winter weather arrives, it's likely to grow more challenging.

The mechanic devotes every start of the week with a fellow worker, positioned outside a Tesla garage within a business district in Malmö. The labor organization, IF Metall, supplies shelter via a portable builders' van, as well as hot beverages and sandwiches.

But it's operations continue normally nearby, where the workshop seems to operate at full capacity.

This industrial action involves a matter that reaches to the core of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority of trade unions to bargain for pay & working terms representing their members. This concept of collective agreement has supported labor dynamics in Sweden for almost a century.

Today some 70% of Scandinavia's employees belong of a trade union, while ninety percent fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes in Sweden are rare.

It's 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 business organization.

But the electric car company has disrupted established practices. Vocal CEO the company leader has said he "opposes" with the idea of labor organizations. "I simply don't like anything that establishes a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he informed an audience in New York last year. "In my view labor groups attempt to generate conflict in a company."

Tesla entered Sweden back in the mid-2010s, while IF Metall has for years sought to secure a collective agreement with the company.

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

She says the union eventually saw no other option except to call a strike, which started in late October, last year. "Usually the threat suffices to issue the threat," comments Ms Nilsson. "Employers typically signs the agreement."

But this did not happen in this case.

The striking mechanic, who is of Latvian origin, started working with the automaker several years ago. He asserts that pay and conditions were often dependent on the whim of managers.

He remembers an evaluation meeting where he says he was denied a salary increase because he was "failing to meet company targets". Meanwhile, a coworker was reported to be rejected for increased compensation because having the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, some workers participated in the industrial action. The company employed approximately 130 technicians employed at the time the industrial action was initiated. IF Metall states that today approximately 70 of its members are on strike.

Tesla has since replaced these with new workers, a situation there is not occurred since the Great Depression.

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] openly & systematically," says German Bender, a researcher at a research institute, a policy organization financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It is not illegal, which is crucial to understand. But it goes against all established norms. Yet the company shows no concern about norms.

"They aim to be convention challengers. So if somebody tells them, hey, you are breaking a standard, they see that as praise."

The company's Swedish subsidiary declined requests for comment via correspondence mentioning "all-time high deliveries".

Indeed, the automaker has given only one press discussion during the entire period since the industrial action began.

In March 2024, the Swedish subsidiary's "national manager, Jens Stark, informed a business paper that it benefited the company more to avoid a union contract, and instead "to work closely with the team and provide workers optimal conditions".

Mr Stark rejected that the decision not to enter a collective agreement was determined by US leadership overseas. "We have a mandate to take independent such decisions," he said.

The union is not completely isolated in its fight. The strike has received backing from several of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in nearby Scandinavian nations, Norway & Finland, decline to process Teslas; rubbish is no longer collected from Tesla's Swedish facilities; while newly built charging stations are not being linked to power networks across the nation.

Exists an example close to the capital's airport, at which twenty chargers stand idle. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, states Tesla owners remain unaffected by the strike.

"There exists another charging station six miles from this location," he says. "And we can continue to purchase vehicles, we can maintain our cars, we can power our cars."

With consequences high for all parties, it's hard to envision an end to the stand-off. The union risks setting a precedent should it surrender the fundamental concept of collective agreement.

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