🔗 Share this article

In Sweden, around 70 automotive mechanics continue to confront one of the world's wealthiest corporations – the electric vehicle manufacturer. This industrial action targeting the US carmaker's 10 Swedish service centers has now reached two years of duration, with minimal indication for a resolution.

One striking worker has remained at the Tesla protest line starting from October 2023.

"It has been a tough time," remarks the 39-year-old. With the nation's chilly winter weather sets in, it is expected to grow even tougher.

Janis devotes each Monday with a colleague, positioned near a Tesla service center on an industrial park in Malmö. The labor organization, IF Metall, provides accommodation via a portable builders' van, plus hot beverages & light meals.

However it remains operations continue normally nearby, at which the workshop seems to be in full swing.

This industrial action concerns a matter that goes to the core of Scandinavia's industrial culture – the right of trade unions to bargain for pay & working terms on behalf of their members. This principle of negotiated labor contracts has supported industrial relations across the nation for nearly a century.

Today approximately seventy percent of Scandinavia's employees are members of a trade union, and 90% are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes across the nation are rare.

This is an arrangement supported across the board. "We prefer the ability to bargain freely with worker representatives and sign labor contracts," states a business representative of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses business organization.

But Tesla has upset the apple cart. Vocal CEO the company leader has said he "opposes" with the concept of unions. "I simply don't like any arrangement which creates a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he informed listeners in New York in 2023. "In my view the unions try to create conflict within businesses."

The automaker came to Sweden starting in the mid-2010s, while IF Metall has for years wanted to establish a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they wouldn't reply," states the union president, the union's leader. "We formed the impression that they tried to avoid or evade discussing this with our representatives."

She says the organization eventually found no alternative than to announce industrial action, which started on 27 October, 2023. "Usually it's enough to make the threat," says the union leader. "The company typically agrees to the agreement."

However not on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally from Latvia, started working for Tesla in 2021. He asserts that pay and conditions frequently dependent on the discretion of managers.

He remembers a performance review where he says he was denied a salary increase because he was "not reaching Tesla's goals". At the same time, a coworker was reported to have been turned down for a pay rise due to having the "wrong attitude".

However, some workers participated on strike. The company employed some 130 mechanics working when the strike was initiated. IF Metall says currently around seventy of their represented workers are on strike.

The automaker has long since substituted the striking workers with new workers, a situation there is not occurred since the era of the Great Depression.

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] publicly & methodically," says a labor researcher, an analyst at Arena Idé, a think tank supported by Swedish trade unions.

"It's not illegal, which is important to understand. But it goes against all established norms. But Tesla doesn't care about norms.

"They want to become norm breakers. Thus when anyone tells them, listen, you are violating a standard, they perceive that as a compliment."

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

Indeed, the company has granted only one media interview in the two years after the strike began.

Earlier this year, the Swedish subsidiary's "country lead", Jens Stark, informed a financial publication that it suited the organization more to avoid a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with employees and provide them the best possible terms".

Mr Stark rejected that the decision not to enter a labor contract was determined by US leadership overseas. "We have authorization to take our own such choices," he stated.

The union is not entirely alone in this conflict. This industrial action has been supported from several of other unions.

Dockworkers in neighbouring Denmark, Norway and Finland, decline to process Teslas; rubbish is no longer removed from Tesla's Swedish facilities; while recently constructed power points are not being connected to power networks in the country.

There is one such facility close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where twenty charging units stand idle. But a Tesla enthusiast, the leader of enthusiasts group the Swedish Tesla association, says vehicle owners are unaffected by the strike.

"There's an alternative power point 10km from this location," he comments. "Plus we are able to still buy our cars, we can maintain our cars, we can power our cars."

With consequences high for all parties, it is difficult to envision an end to the deadlock. The union faces the danger of establishing a pattern if it concedes the fundamental concept of negotiated labor contracts.

"The concern is how that would spread," states the researcher, "and eventually {erode