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Across Sweden, around seventy car mechanics persist to confront among the world's richest corporations – Tesla. This labor strike at the American automaker's 10 Swedish service centers has now reached two years of duration, with little indication of a resolution.

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

"It's a tough time," remarks the 39-year-old. With Sweden's cold winter weather sets in, it is expected to become more challenging.

Janis spends every start of the week with a fellow worker, positioned near an electric vehicle garage on a business district in Malmö. The labor organization, the Swedish metalworkers' union, provides accommodation in the form of a mobile construction vehicle, as well as hot beverages & sandwiches.

But it's operations continue normally nearby, at which the workshop appears to be in full swing.

This industrial action involves a matter that goes to the core of Swedish industrial culture – the right for worker organizations to bargain for pay & working terms on behalf of their workforce. This concept of collective agreement has underpinned labor dynamics across the nation for nearly one hundred years.

Currently some 70% of Scandinavia's employees are members to labor organizations, and ninety percent fall under by a collective agreement. Labor stoppages in Sweden occur infrequently.

This is a system supported by all parties. "We prefer the ability to bargain freely with the unions and sign collective agreements," states a business representative of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise employer group.

However the electric car company has disrupted the apple cart. Outspoken CEO Elon Musk has said he "disagrees" with the concept of labor organizations. "I just don't like any arrangement that establishes a sort of hierarchical situation," he informed an audience at an event in 2023. "I think labor groups attempt to generate conflict in a company."

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

"Yet they did not respond," states Marie Nilsson, the organization's president. "And we got the impression that they tried to avoid or evade discussing the matter with us."

She says the organization ultimately found no alternative than to call a strike, which started on 27 October, last year. "Usually the threat suffices to issue the threat," says Ms Nilsson. "The company typically signs the agreement."

However not on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, began employment with the automaker several years ago. He claims that wages and conditions were often dependent on the whim of supervisors.

He remembers an evaluation meeting where he says he was refused an annual pay rise because that he "not reaching company targets". At the same time, a coworker was said to have been turned down for a pay rise due to he had the "wrong attitude".

However, some workers went out on strike. Tesla had some one hundred thirty technicians working at the time the industrial action was called. The union says that today around 70 of its members are on strike.

The automaker has since substituted the striking workers with replacement staff, for which that has not occurred since the Great Depression.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] publicly and methodically," says German Bender, an analyst at Arena Idé, a policy organization financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It is not against the law, this being important to recognize. But it goes against all established practices. But the company shows no concern about norms.

"They aim to be norm breakers. So if somebody tells them, listen, you are violating a standard, they see that as a compliment."

The company's local division refused requests for comment via correspondence citing "record vehicle shipments".

In fact, the automaker has given just a single press discussion during the entire period after the industrial action started.

Earlier this year, the Swedish subsidiary's "national manager, Jens Stark, told a business paper that it suited the company more not to have a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with employees and provide them optimal terms".

The executive denied that the choice to avoid a labor contract was one made at Tesla headquarters in the US. "We have a mandate to take our own such decisions," he stated.

IF Metall is not completely isolated in this conflict. The strike has been supported from several of other unions.

Dockworkers in nearby Denmark, Norway & Finland, decline to handle Teslas; rubbish is not collected from Tesla's Scandinavian locations; and newly built charging stations remain connected to the grid across the nation.

Exists one such facility close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which twenty charging units remain unused. However a Tesla enthusiast, the leader of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, says vehicle owners remain unaffected by the strike.

"There's an alternative power point six miles from here," he says. "And we can still buy our cars, we can service our cars, we can charge our cars."

With consequences significant for all parties, it's hard to envision a resolution to the deadlock. The union risks establishing a pattern if it concedes the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

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