🔗 Share this article

In Sweden, approximately 70 automotive technicians continue to challenge among the globe's richest corporations – the electric vehicle manufacturer. The labor strike at the US automaker's ten Scandinavian service centers has now entered two years of duration, with minimal sign for a settlement.

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

"It has been a tough period," remarks the 39-year-old. With the nation's chilly seasonal conditions sets in, it is expected to grow more challenging.

The mechanic devotes every start of the week alongside a fellow worker, positioned near an electric vehicle service center on an industrial park in Malmö. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies accommodation via a portable builders' van, as well as hot beverages and sandwiches.

However it's business as usual across the road, at which the workshop seems to be in full swing.

This industrial action concerns a matter that reaches to the core of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority of trade unions to negotiate wages & working terms on behalf of their workforce. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has underpinned industrial relations across the nation for nearly a century.

Currently some seventy percent of Swedish workers are members to labor organizations, and 90% fall under by a collective agreement. Labor stoppages in Sweden are rare.

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

But the electric car company has disrupted established practices. Vocal chief executive Elon Musk has said he "opposes" with the idea of unions. "I simply don't like anything which creates a kind of hierarchical sort of thing," he told an audience in New York last year. "In my view labor groups attempt to create negativity within businesses."

The automaker came to the Scandinavian market back in the mid-2010s, and the metalworkers' union has for years sought to secure a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they did not reply," says Marie Nilsson, the union's leader. "And we got the belief that they tried to hide away or evade discussing the matter with us."

She says the organization eventually saw no other option than to call a strike, beginning on 27 October, last year. "Typically it's enough to issue a warning," comments the union leader. "Employers usually agrees to the contract."

But not on this occasion.

Janis Kuzma, who is from Latvia, began employment for Tesla in 2021. He claims that pay and work terms frequently dependent on the whim of supervisors.

He recalls an evaluation meeting where he says he was refused an annual pay rise because that he "failing to meet Tesla's goals". At the same time, a colleague was said to have been turned down for increased compensation due to he had the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, not everyone participated on strike. Tesla had approximately 130 technicians working at the time the strike was called. The union says that today around seventy of its members are participating in the action.

The automaker has long since replaced the striking workers with replacement staff, for which that has no precedent since the 1930s.

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

"It is not illegal, which is crucial to recognize. But it violates all traditional practices. Yet Tesla doesn't care for conventions.

"They want to be convention challengers. Thus when somebody tells them, hey, you are breaking a norm, they perceive that as a compliment."

The automaker's local division declined attempts for interview via correspondence mentioning "all-time high deliveries".

In fact, the automaker has granted just a single media interview during the entire period since the strike began.

Earlier this year, the local division's "country lead", the executive, told a financial publication that it benefited the organization better not to have a union contract, and rather "to work closely with the team and give them the best possible conditions".

The executive denied that the decision to avoid a labor contract was one made by US leadership in the US. "We have a mandate to make our own such decisions," he stated.

IF Metall is not entirely alone in this conflict. The strike has been supported from several of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Norway and Finland, decline to handle the company's vehicles; waste is not removed from the automaker's Swedish facilities; while newly built charging stations are not being connected to the grid in the country.

There is an example close to the capital's airport, at which 20 chargers remain unused. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, states vehicle owners remain unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's an alternative power point 10km from this location," he comments. "Plus we are able to continue to purchase vehicles, we can service our cars, we can charge our electric cars."

With consequences significant on both sides, it is difficult to see a resolution to the deadlock. The union faces the danger of establishing a pattern if it concedes the fundamental concept of negotiated labor contracts.

"The concern is that this could expand," says Mr Bender, "and eventually {erode