🔗 Share this article

Across Sweden, approximately 70 automotive technicians continue to confront one of the globe's richest companies – Tesla. This industrial action targeting the US automaker's 10 Scandinavian service centers has currently reached two years of duration, with little sign of a resolution.

One striking worker has remained at the electric car company's protest line starting from October 2023.

"It has been a difficult period," states the worker in his late thirties. And as the nation's cold seasonal conditions sets in, it is expected to become more challenging.

The mechanic spends every start of the week with a fellow worker, positioned outside a Tesla service center within an industrial park located in southern Sweden. The labor organization, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies shelter via a mobile builders' van, plus hot beverages & light meals.

But it's operations continue normally across the road, where the service facility seems to operate at full capacity.

The strike involves an issue that reaches to the core of Swedish labor traditions – the right for worker organizations to negotiate pay and conditions on behalf of their workforce. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported industrial relations in Sweden for almost one hundred years.

Today some 70% of Swedish employees belong of a trade union, while 90% fall under by a collective agreement. Strikes in Sweden occur infrequently.

It's a system supported by all parties. "We prefer the right to bargain directly with the unions and establish labor contracts," says Mattias Dahl from the Association of Swedish Businesses business organization.

However Tesla has disrupted the apple cart. Outspoken chief executive the company leader has stated he "disagrees" with the concept of unions. "I simply don't like any arrangement that establishes a sort of lords and peasants situation," he told listeners at an event last year. "In my view labor groups try to generate negativity in a company."

The automaker entered Sweden starting in the mid-2010s, and the metalworkers' union has for years sought to establish a labor contract with the automaker.

"Yet they wouldn't reply," says Marie Nilsson, the union's president. "We formed the belief that they attempted to avoid or evade discussing this with our representatives."

She states the organization ultimately found no alternative except to call industrial action, beginning in late October, last year. "Typically the threat suffices to make a warning," comments Ms Nilsson. "Employers typically signs the contract."

But not on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally from Latvia, started working with the automaker in 2021. He asserts that pay and conditions frequently subject to the discretion of managers.

He recalls a performance review where he states he was refused a salary increase on grounds he was "not reaching company targets". At the same time, a coworker was reported to have been turned down for increased compensation due to he had the "wrong attitude".

However, not everyone went out in the industrial action. Tesla employed approximately 130 technicians employed when the strike was called. The union states that today approximately seventy of their represented workers are on strike.

The automaker has since replaced the striking workers with replacement staff, for which there is not occurred since the era of the 1930s.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] publicly and methodically," says German Bender, a researcher at a research institute, a think tank financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It's not against the law, which is important to recognize. But it violates all established practices. But the company shows no concern about norms.

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

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary declined attempts for comment via correspondence mentioning "record deliveries".

Indeed, the automaker has granted just a single media interview in the two years after the industrial action started.

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, the executive, told a financial publication that it suited the company better not to have a union contract, and rather "to work closely with employees and give them the best possible conditions".

Mr Stark denied that the decision to avoid a collective agreement was determined by US leadership in the US. "Our division possesses a mandate to make independent such choices," he stated.

IF Metall is not completely alone in its fight. This industrial action has received backing from several of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in nearby Denmark, Nordic countries and neighboring states, decline to handle Teslas; rubbish is not removed from Tesla's Swedish facilities; and recently constructed charging stations are not being connected to the grid in the country.

There is one such facility near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which twenty charging units stand idle. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of enthusiasts group Tesla Club Sweden, states vehicle owners are unaffected by the strike.

"There's an alternative power point six miles from here," he says. "Plus we are able to continue to buy our cars, we can service our cars, we can charge our cars."

With stakes high on both sides, it is difficult to see an end to the deadlock. IF Metall risks setting a precedent if it concedes the principle of collective agreement.

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