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In Sweden, approximately seventy automotive technicians continue to challenge among the world's richest corporations – Tesla. The labor strike at the US automaker's 10 Scandinavian repair facilities has currently reached two years of duration, with minimal indication of a resolution.

One striking worker has remained at the electric car company's protest line since the autumn of 2023.

"It's a difficult period," states the 39-year-old. With Sweden's cold winter weather arrives, it's likely to become even tougher.

The mechanic devotes each Monday with a fellow worker, standing outside an electric vehicle service center on an industrial park located in southern Sweden. The labor organization, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies shelter in the form of a portable builders' van, as well as hot beverages and light meals.

However it's business as usual across the road, at which the service facility appears to be in full swing.

This industrial action involves a matter that reaches to the heart of Swedish labor traditions – the authority of trade unions to negotiate pay and conditions on behalf of their members. This concept of collective agreement has supported labor dynamics in Sweden for nearly one hundred years.

Currently approximately seventy percent of Swedish employees belong of a trade union, and ninety percent are covered by a collective agreement. Labor stoppages in Sweden are rare.

This is an arrangement welcomed by all parties. "We prefer the ability to negotiate freely with worker representatives and sign labor contracts," says Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses business organization.

However the electric car company has disrupted the apple cart. Vocal CEO Elon Musk has said he "opposes" with the concept of labor organizations. "I simply disapprove of any arrangement that establishes a kind of hierarchical sort of thing," he told listeners at an event last year. "I think labor groups try to create conflict in a company."

Tesla entered Sweden starting in the mid-2010s, while the metalworkers' union has long sought to secure a collective agreement with the company.

"But they did not reply," says the union president, the organization's president. "And we got the belief that they tried to avoid or evade discussing this with us."

She states the organization ultimately found no other option than to call a strike, beginning on 27 October, 2023. "Typically it's enough to make the threat," says the union leader. "The company usually signs the contract."

However this did not happen on this occasion.

Janis Kuzma, originally from Latvia, started working for Tesla in 2021. He asserts that pay and conditions frequently dependent on the discretion of supervisors.

He remembers a performance review at which he states he was denied an annual pay rise on grounds that he "failing to meet Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a colleague was reported to have been turned down for a pay rise because he had an "inappropriate demeanor".

Nevertheless, not everyone participated on strike. The company employed approximately one hundred thirty technicians employed when the industrial action was initiated. IF Metall states that today approximately seventy of its members are participating in the action.

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

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] publicly & systematically," states a labor researcher, an analyst at a research institute, a think tank financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It is not against the law, this being important to understand. However it violates all established practices. Yet the company shows no concern for conventions.

"They want to become convention challengers. Thus when somebody tells them, hey, you are breaking a standard, they see this as praise."

The company's local division declined attempts for comment in an email citing "record deliveries".

In fact, the company has given only one press discussion during the entire period since the industrial action started.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, Jens Stark, informed a financial publication that it suited the company more to avoid a union contract, and instead "to collaborate directly with employees and provide workers the best possible conditions".

Mr Stark rejected that the decision to avoid a collective agreement was one made by US leadership overseas. "We have a mandate to make independent such choices," he said.

The union is not completely alone in its fight. The strike has received backing by a number of other unions.

Dockworkers in neighbouring Denmark, Nordic countries and Finland, decline to process Teslas; rubbish is no longer collected from Tesla's Swedish facilities; and newly built charging stations are not being connected to power networks across the nation.

Exists an example near the capital's airport, at which twenty charging units remain unused. But Tibor Blomhäll, the leader of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, states Tesla owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

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

With consequences high on both sides, it is difficult to see a resolution to the stand-off. The union faces the danger of establishing a pattern if it concedes the principle of collective agreement.

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