🔗 Share this article

Across Sweden, around seventy automotive technicians continue to confront one of the world's wealthiest companies – Tesla. This industrial action at the American carmaker's ten Swedish repair facilities has currently reached its second anniversary, and there is minimal sign of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been on the electric car company's protest line since the autumn of 2023.

"It's a difficult time," remarks the worker in his late thirties. With the nation's cold seasonal conditions arrives, it's likely to grow even tougher.

Janis devotes every start of the week alongside a fellow worker, standing near an electric vehicle service center on an industrial park in Malmö. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies accommodation via a mobile builders' van, plus hot beverages & light meals.

However it remains business as usual nearby, where the service facility appears to operate in full swing.

The strike concerns a matter that goes to the heart of Swedish industrial culture – the authority for worker organizations to negotiate pay and working terms representing their members. This concept of collective agreement has underpinned industrial relations in Sweden for almost one hundred years.

Today approximately 70% of Swedish employees are members to labor organizations, while 90% fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes in Sweden are rare.

It's an arrangement supported by all parties. "We prefer the ability to bargain freely with worker representatives and establish collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses business organization.

However the electric car company has disrupted the apple cart. Outspoken chief executive Elon Musk has said he "disagrees" with the idea of labor organizations. "I just don't like any arrangement that establishes a sort of lords and peasants sort of thing," he informed an audience in New York in 2023. "I think the unions try to generate negativity in a company."

The automaker entered the Scandinavian market back in 2014, while IF Metall has long wanted to establish a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they did not reply," states the union president, the union's leader. "We formed the belief that they attempted to hide away or evade discussing this with us."

She states the organization ultimately found no other option than to announce a strike, which started in late October, 2023. "Typically the threat suffices to make the threat," comments the union leader. "Employers usually signs the agreement."

However not in this case.

Janis Kuzma, who is of Latvian origin, started working for Tesla several years ago. He asserts that wages and work terms were often subject to the discretion of managers.

He recalls a performance review where he states he was refused a salary increase on grounds that he "not reaching company targets". At the same time, a colleague was said to have been rejected 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 strike was called. The union states that today around seventy of their represented workers are on strike.

Tesla has since substituted these with new workers, a situation there is no precedent since the 1930s.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] openly and systematically," says a labor researcher, a researcher at Arena Idé, a policy organization financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It is not against the law, this being crucial to understand. But it violates all established practices. Yet Tesla doesn't care for conventions.

"They aim to become convention challengers. So if somebody informs them, hey, you are violating a standard, they see this as praise."

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary refused requests for comment via correspondence citing "all-time high deliveries".

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

Earlier this year, the local division's "national manager, the executive, told a financial publication that it suited the company better to avoid a union contract, and rather "to work closely with employees and provide them optimal terms".

Mr Stark denied that the decision not to enter a collective agreement was one made by US leadership in the US. "Our division possesses authorization to take our own such decisions," he stated.

The union is not entirely alone in its fight. This industrial action has received backing by a number of other unions.

Dockworkers in nearby Denmark, Nordic countries and Finland, are refusing to process the company's vehicles; rubbish is no longer removed from the automaker's Swedish facilities; and recently constructed power points are not being linked to power networks across the nation.

There is one such facility close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which twenty chargers remain unused. However Tibor Blomhäll, the leader of enthusiasts group Tesla Club Sweden, says vehicle owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's another charging station six miles from this location," he comments. "Plus we are able to still buy our cars, we can maintain our cars, we can charge our electric cars."

With consequences high on both sides, it is difficult to envision a resolution to the stand-off. The union faces the danger of setting a precedent should it surrender the fundamental concept of negotiated labor contracts.

"The worry is how that would spread," states Mr Bender, "and ultimately {erode