🔗 Share this article

Across Sweden, around seventy car mechanics persist to confront one of the globe's richest corporations – the electric vehicle manufacturer. This industrial action targeting the US automaker's 10 Swedish service centers has currently reached two years of duration, and there is minimal sign of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has remained at the Tesla protest line starting from the autumn of 2023.

"It has been a difficult period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. And as Sweden's cold winter weather sets in, it is expected to become even tougher.

The mechanic spends each Monday alongside a colleague, positioned outside an electric vehicle garage on an industrial park located in southern Sweden. The labor organization, the Swedish metalworkers' union, provides accommodation via a portable construction vehicle, plus coffee and sandwiches.

But it's business as usual across the road, at which the service facility seems to be at full capacity.

This industrial action concerns an issue that goes to the heart of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority for worker organizations to bargain for wages & working terms representing their members. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported labor dynamics in Sweden for nearly a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Swedish employees belong to labor organizations, while 90% are covered by a collective agreement. Strikes in Sweden occur infrequently.

This is a system welcomed across the board. "We favor the ability to bargain directly with the unions and establish labor contracts," says Mattias Dahl from the Association of Swedish Businesses business organization.

But the electric car company has disrupted the apple cart. Vocal chief executive Elon Musk has stated he "disagrees" with the concept of unions. "I simply don't like any arrangement which creates a sort of hierarchical situation," he told listeners at an event in 2023. "In my view labor groups try to generate conflict in a company."

The automaker entered Sweden starting in 2014, while the metalworkers' union has long sought to secure a collective agreement with the automaker.

"But they wouldn't reply," says Marie Nilsson, the union's president. "And we got the belief that they attempted to hide away or evade discussing the matter with us."

She says the union eventually saw no other option except to call industrial action, which started in late October, last year. "Usually it's enough to issue the threat," says Ms Nilsson. "Employers typically signs the agreement."

However not on this occasion.

Janis Kuzma, originally from Latvia, started working for Tesla in 2021. He claims that pay and conditions were often dependent on the whim of supervisors.

He recalls a performance review where he states he was refused a salary increase because he was "failing to meet company targets". Meanwhile, a coworker was said to have been rejected for a pay rise due to he had an "inappropriate demeanor".

However, some workers participated in the industrial action. Tesla had approximately one hundred thirty technicians working at the time the industrial action was initiated. IF Metall states that today around seventy of its members are participating in the action.

The automaker has since substituted these with new workers, for which there is not occurred since the 1930s.

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

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

"They want to be convention challengers. Thus when anyone informs them, listen, you are violating a standard, they perceive that as praise."

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary declined requests for interview via correspondence mentioning "record vehicle shipments".

In fact, the automaker has given only one media interview in the two years after the strike began.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, the executive, told a business paper that it suited the company better to avoid a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with employees and give workers the best possible terms".

The executive rejected that the decision to avoid a labor contract was one made by US leadership overseas. "Our division possesses authorization to take our own such decisions," he said.

The union is not completely alone in this conflict. The strike has received backing from several of labor organizations.

Port workers in neighbouring Denmark, Nordic countries & Finland, are refusing to process Teslas; waste is not collected from Tesla's Scandinavian locations; while newly built power points are not being linked to the grid in the country.

There is one such facility near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which twenty charging units remain unused. However a Tesla enthusiast, the president of enthusiasts group the Swedish Tesla association, says vehicle owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's another charging station six miles from here," he says. "Plus we are able to still purchase vehicles, we can maintain our cars, we can charge our electric cars."

With stakes significant on both sides, it's hard to envision an end to the stand-off. The union risks setting a precedent if it concedes the fundamental concept of negotiated labor contracts.

"The concern is that this could expand," says the researcher, "and ultimately {erode