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Across Sweden, around 70 automotive mechanics persist to challenge one of the globe's richest companies – the electric vehicle manufacturer. The industrial action targeting the American carmaker's 10 Swedish service centers has currently entered its second anniversary, and there is minimal indication for a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has remained on the Tesla picket line starting from the autumn of 2023.

"It has been a tough time," states the worker in his late thirties. With the nation's cold winter weather arrives, it's likely to grow even tougher.

The mechanic devotes each Monday alongside a colleague, standing outside an electric vehicle service center on a business district in Malmö. His union, IF Metall, provides shelter via a mobile construction vehicle, as well as hot beverages & sandwiches.

But it's business as usual nearby, at which the workshop appears to operate at full capacity.

This industrial action involves an issue that goes to the core of Swedish labor traditions – the right for worker organizations to negotiate wages and working terms representing their workforce. This principle of collective agreement has supported labor dynamics in Sweden for nearly one hundred years.

Today some 70% of Scandinavia's workers are members to labor organizations, and ninety percent fall under by a collective agreement. Labor stoppages across the nation occur infrequently.

This is an arrangement supported across the board. "We favor the ability to bargain directly with the unions and sign collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses business organization.

But the electric car company has disrupted established practices. Outspoken chief executive Elon Musk has stated he "disagrees" with the concept of unions. "I just don't like any arrangement which creates a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he told listeners at an event last year. "I think labor groups attempt to create conflict in a company."

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

"Yet they wouldn't respond," says the union president, the organization's leader. "We formed the belief that they tried to hide away or evade discussing this with us."

She states the union eventually saw no other option than to call industrial action, beginning on 27 October, last year. "Typically it's enough to make a warning," comments the union leader. "The company usually agrees to the agreement."

But this did not happen on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, began employment for Tesla in 2021. He claims that wages & work terms were often dependent on the discretion of supervisors.

He recalls an evaluation meeting at which he states he was refused an annual pay rise because that he "failing to meet company targets". At the same time, a coworker was said to be rejected for a pay rise because he had the "wrong attitude".

However, some workers participated on strike. The company had approximately one hundred thirty technicians employed when the strike was called. The union says currently around 70 of its members are on strike.

The automaker has since substituted the striking workers with new workers, for which there is no precedent since the era of the Great Depression.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] publicly and systematically," states a labor researcher, a researcher at Arena Idé, a policy organization supported by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not illegal, which is crucial to understand. However it violates all established practices. But Tesla shows no concern for conventions.

"They want to become convention challengers. So if anyone informs them, listen, you are breaking a standard, they see that as a compliment."

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary declined requests for interview via correspondence citing "all-time high vehicle shipments".

In fact, the company has granted just a single press discussion in the two years after the industrial action started.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, the executive, informed a financial publication that it suited the organization better to avoid a collective agreement, and instead "to collaborate directly with employees and give them optimal terms".

Mr Stark rejected that the choice to avoid a labor contract was one made by US leadership overseas. "Our division possesses a mandate to make our own such decisions," he said.

IF Metall is not completely alone in this conflict. This industrial action has received backing from several of other unions.

Port workers in neighbouring Denmark, Nordic countries and Finland, are refusing to process the company's vehicles; rubbish is no longer collected from Tesla's Swedish facilities; and newly built power points are not being linked to the grid across the nation.

There is an example close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where twenty charging units stand idle. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, states Tesla owners remain unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists another charging station 10km from here," he says. "Plus we are able to continue to buy our cars, we can service our vehicles, we can power our electric cars."

With consequences high on both sides, it is difficult to envision a resolution to the deadlock. IF Metall risks setting a precedent should it surrender the fundamental concept of collective agreement.

"The worry is how this could expand," says the researcher, "and ultimately {erode