🔗 Share this article

In Sweden, approximately seventy automotive technicians persist to confront one of the world's richest companies – Tesla. This labor strike at the US carmaker's 10 Swedish repair facilities has currently reached two years of duration, with little sign of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been at the electric car company's protest line starting from the autumn of 2023.

"It has been a difficult time," states the worker in his late thirties. With the nation's cold winter weather arrives, it's likely to grow more challenging.

Janis spends each Monday with a fellow worker, positioned near an electric vehicle service center on a business district located in southern Sweden. The labor organization, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies accommodation in the form of a portable builders' van, plus hot beverages & sandwiches.

However it's operations continue normally nearby, at which the service facility seems to be at full capacity.

This industrial action concerns an issue that goes to the core of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority of trade unions to negotiate wages & conditions on behalf of their workforce. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported industrial relations across the nation for almost one hundred years.

Currently some 70% of Swedish employees belong of a trade union, and ninety percent are covered under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes across the nation are rare.

It's an arrangement supported by all parties. "We prefer the ability to bargain freely with worker representatives and establish collective agreements," says Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses employer group.

But the electric car company has upset the apple cart. Outspoken CEO Elon Musk has said he "opposes" with the concept of unions. "I simply disapprove of any arrangement which creates a sort of lords and peasants sort of thing," he told an audience at an event last year. "I think labor groups attempt to create conflict within businesses."

The automaker came to Sweden starting in 2014, while the metalworkers' union has for years sought to establish a labor contract with the automaker.

"But they did not respond," says 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 saw no alternative than to announce a strike, which started in late October, last year. "Typically it's enough to issue a warning," says the union leader. "The company usually agrees to the agreement."

However not in this case.

Janis Kuzma, originally of Latvian origin, started working with the automaker several years ago. He asserts that pay & conditions frequently dependent on the whim of supervisors.

He remembers a performance review at which he says he was denied a salary increase because that he "not reaching company targets". Meanwhile, a coworker was reported to be rejected for increased compensation due to he had the "wrong attitude".

However, not everyone went out on strike. The company employed approximately 130 technicians working when the industrial action was called. IF Metall says currently approximately seventy of their represented workers are participating in the action.

The automaker has long since replaced the striking workers with replacement staff, for which there is no precedent since the Great Depression.

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] openly and systematically," states German Bender, an analyst at Arena Idé, a think tank financed by Swedish trade unions.

"It's not against the law, this being crucial to understand. But it goes against all established practices. But Tesla shows no concern about norms.

"They want to be norm breakers. Thus when somebody tells them, hey, you are violating a norm, they see this as a compliment."

The company's local division refused attempts for comment via correspondence mentioning "all-time high deliveries".

Indeed, the automaker has granted only one media interview in the two years after the strike started.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, the executive, informed a financial publication that it benefited the company better to avoid a collective agreement, and instead "to collaborate directly with the team and provide them the best possible conditions".

The executive rejected that the choice to avoid a labor contract was determined by US leadership in the US. "We have authorization to take our own such decisions," he said.

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

Port workers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Nordic countries and neighboring states, decline to handle Teslas; rubbish is no longer collected from Tesla's Swedish facilities; while recently constructed charging stations are not being linked to power networks in the country.

There is one such facility near the capital's airport, where twenty charging units stand idle. However Tibor Blomhäll, the leader of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, states vehicle owners remain unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists another charging station 10km from here," he says. "Plus we are able to continue to purchase vehicles, we can service our cars, we can power our cars."

With consequences high on both sides, it is difficult to envision a resolution to the deadlock. The union faces the danger of establishing a pattern if it concedes the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

"The worry is how that would spread," says the researcher, "and eventually {erode