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In Sweden, approximately seventy car technicians persist to challenge among the world's wealthiest corporations – the electric vehicle manufacturer. This industrial action targeting the American carmaker's ten Swedish repair facilities has now reached its second anniversary, with little indication of a settlement.

Janis Kuzma has been on the Tesla protest line since the autumn of 2023.

"It has been a tough period," states the worker in his late thirties. With Sweden's cold winter weather arrives, it is expected to grow more challenging.

The mechanic spends each Monday alongside a colleague, positioned outside a Tesla service center within a business district in Malmö. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies shelter via a portable construction vehicle, plus coffee & light meals.

But it remains business as usual across the road, where the workshop appears to be in full swing.

The strike involves an issue that goes to the heart of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority of trade unions to negotiate wages and conditions representing their workforce. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has underpinned industrial relations across the nation for nearly one hundred years.

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

This is an arrangement supported across the board. "We favor the right to bargain directly with worker representatives and establish collective agreements," says a business representative of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise business organization.

But Tesla has disrupted established practices. Vocal CEO Elon Musk has said he "opposes" with the idea of labor organizations. "I simply disapprove of anything that establishes a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he informed listeners at an event last year. "I think the unions attempt to create conflict in a company."

The automaker came to Sweden starting in 2014, while IF Metall has for years wanted to secure a labor contract with the automaker.

"But they wouldn't respond," says the union president, the organization's leader. "And we got the impression that they attempted to avoid or not discuss this with our representatives."

She states the union ultimately found no alternative except to call a strike, beginning on 27 October, 2023. "Usually it's enough to make the threat," says Ms Nilsson. "Employers typically agrees to the agreement."

But not on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, started working with the automaker several years ago. He asserts that pay & work terms were often subject to the whim of supervisors.

He recalls an evaluation meeting at which he states he was denied an annual pay rise because he was "failing to meet company targets". Meanwhile, a coworker was reported to have been turned down for increased compensation due to having the "wrong attitude".

However, not everyone participated on strike. Tesla had approximately one hundred thirty mechanics working when the industrial action was called. IF Metall states currently approximately 70 of their represented workers are participating in the action.

Tesla has since replaced the striking workers with new workers, a situation there is no precedent since the era of the Great Depression.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] publicly & methodically," says German Bender, a researcher at a research institute, a policy organization financed by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not illegal, this being important to understand. However it goes against all established norms. Yet Tesla doesn't care about norms.

"They aim to be norm breakers. Thus when anyone tells them, hey, you are violating a standard, they see that as a compliment."

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

In fact, the company has given just a single media interview in the two years after the strike started.

Earlier this year, the local division's "country lead", the executive, informed a financial publication that it benefited the organization better to avoid a union contract, and instead "to collaborate directly with the team and give them optimal conditions".

Mr Stark rejected that the choice not to enter a collective agreement was determined at Tesla headquarters overseas. "We have authorization to make independent such decisions," he stated.

The union is not completely alone in this conflict. The strike has been supported from several of other unions.

Port workers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Nordic countries and neighboring states, decline to process the company's vehicles; waste is no longer removed from the automaker's Scandinavian locations; while recently constructed charging stations are not being connected to power networks in the country.

There is an example near the capital's airport, at which 20 chargers remain unused. However Tibor Blomhäll, the leader of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, says Tesla owners remain unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists an alternative power point six miles from this location," he says. "And we can continue to purchase vehicles, we can maintain our vehicles, we can power our cars."

With stakes high for all parties, it is difficult to see 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 that would spread," states Mr Bender, "and eventually {erode