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Across Sweden, approximately 70 automotive mechanics persist to confront one of the globe's wealthiest corporations – Tesla. The labor strike at the US automaker's ten Scandinavian service centers has currently entered two years of duration, and there is little sign for a settlement.

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

"It has been a tough period," states the worker in his late thirties. With Sweden's chilly seasonal conditions arrives, it's likely to grow more challenging.

The mechanic devotes every start of the week with a colleague, standing near an electric vehicle garage within a business district located in southern Sweden. The labor organization, IF Metall, supplies accommodation via a portable construction vehicle, plus coffee & sandwiches.

However it remains operations continue normally across the road, where the service facility seems to be in full swing.

The strike involves an issue that reaches to the core of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority of trade unions to negotiate pay & working terms on behalf of their members. This principle of collective agreement has underpinned industrial relations across the nation for almost a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Swedish employees are members of a trade union, while ninety percent are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes across the nation are rare.

This is an arrangement supported across the board. "We favor the right to negotiate directly with the unions and establish collective agreements," says Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise business organization.

However Tesla has upset the apple cart. Outspoken chief executive Elon Musk has said he "disagrees" with the idea of unions. "I just don't like any arrangement that establishes a sort of hierarchical situation," he told listeners at an event last year. "In my view the unions attempt to generate conflict within businesses."

Tesla entered Sweden starting in 2014, while IF Metall has long wanted to establish a labor contract with the automaker.

"But they did not respond," says Marie Nilsson, the union's leader. "And we got the belief that they tried to hide away or not discuss this with us."

She says the union eventually saw no other option except to announce a strike, beginning on 27 October, last year. "Typically it's enough to make the threat," comments Ms Nilsson. "Employers typically signs the contract."

However not in this case.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, started working for Tesla in 2021. He claims that pay & work terms frequently subject to the whim of managers.

He remembers an evaluation meeting where he states he was refused a salary increase on grounds that he "failing to meet Tesla's goals". At the same time, a coworker was reported to be rejected for a pay rise due to he had an "inappropriate demeanor".

Nevertheless, not everyone participated on strike. The company employed some 130 technicians working at the time the strike was initiated. The union says currently approximately seventy of its members are participating in the action.

Tesla has since replaced the striking workers with new workers, for which there is not occurred since the era of the 1930s.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] publicly and methodically," says a labor researcher, a researcher at Arena Idé, a think tank supported by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not illegal, this being crucial to recognize. But it goes against all established practices. But the company doesn't care about norms.

"They aim to become convention challengers. Thus when somebody informs them, listen, you are violating a standard, they see this as praise."

The company's local division refused attempts for comment in an email mentioning "all-time high vehicle shipments".

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

Earlier this year, the local division's "national manager, the executive, informed a business paper that it benefited the company better to avoid a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with the team and give them optimal conditions".

The executive rejected that the choice not to enter a labor contract was one made at Tesla headquarters in the US. "We have a mandate to take our own such decisions," he said.

The union is not completely isolated in this conflict. This industrial action has been supported by a number of labor organizations.

Port workers in nearby Denmark, Norway & Finland, are refusing to process the company's vehicles; rubbish is not collected from the automaker's Swedish facilities; and newly built power points are not being linked to the grid in the country.

There is an example close to the capital's airport, at which twenty charging units remain unused. However Tibor Blomhäll, the leader of enthusiasts group Tesla Club Sweden, says vehicle owners remain unaffected by the strike.

"There exists an alternative power point 10km from here," he comments. "Plus we are able to still buy our cars, we can maintain our vehicles, we can charge our electric cars."

With stakes significant for all parties, it's hard to envision a resolution to the deadlock. The union faces the danger of establishing a pattern should it surrender the principle of collective agreement.

"The concern is how that would spread," says Mr Bender, "and eventually {erode