🔗 Share this article

Across Sweden, around seventy automotive mechanics persist to challenge among the globe's richest companies – the electric vehicle manufacturer. The industrial action targeting the US automaker's ten Swedish repair facilities has now reached its second anniversary, with little sign for a resolution.

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

"It's a tough period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. With Sweden's cold seasonal conditions sets in, it's likely to become more challenging.

The mechanic spends each Monday alongside a colleague, positioned near an electric vehicle garage within a business district located in southern Sweden. The labor organization, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies accommodation in the form of a portable construction vehicle, as well as coffee & light meals.

But it's business as usual nearby, where the service facility seems to be in full swing.

The strike concerns a matter that goes to the core of Swedish labor traditions – the right of trade unions to bargain for pay & working terms on behalf of their workforce. This principle of collective agreement has supported industrial relations across the nation for nearly one hundred years.

Today some seventy percent of Swedish employees are members of a trade union, while 90% are covered by a collective agreement. Strikes across the nation occur infrequently.

This is an arrangement supported by all parties. "We favor the right to bargain freely with the unions and establish collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses employer group.

But the electric car company has disrupted established practices. Outspoken CEO Elon Musk has said he "opposes" with the concept of labor organizations. "I simply don't like any arrangement that establishes a kind of hierarchical situation," he told listeners in New York last year. "I think labor groups try to generate conflict in a company."

The automaker came to Sweden back in 2014, while IF Metall has long wanted to secure a collective agreement with the automaker.

"Yet they wouldn't reply," says the union president, the union's president. "And we got the belief that they attempted to hide away or evade discussing the matter with our representatives."

She states the organization eventually found no alternative than to announce a strike, beginning on 27 October, last year. "Usually the threat suffices to issue the threat," comments the union leader. "The company typically agrees to the agreement."

But not in this case.

Janis Kuzma, originally of Latvian origin, began employment with the automaker in 2021. He claims that pay and work terms frequently dependent on the whim of managers.

He recalls an evaluation meeting where he says he was refused an annual pay rise because he was "not reaching company targets". At the same time, a coworker was reported to be turned down for increased compensation because having the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, not everyone participated in the industrial action. The company employed some one hundred thirty technicians working when the strike was called. The union says currently around seventy of its members are on strike.

Tesla has since substituted these with new workers, for which that has no precedent since the era of the Great Depression.

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

"It is not illegal, which is crucial to understand. But it violates all established norms. But Tesla shows no concern for conventions.

"They aim to become norm breakers. Thus when somebody informs them, listen, you are violating a standard, they see that as a compliment."

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

In fact, the company has given only one media interview during the entire period after the industrial action began.

Earlier this year, the Swedish subsidiary's "country lead", the executive, told a business paper that it benefited the company better to avoid a collective agreement, and instead "to collaborate directly with the team and give them optimal conditions".

Mr Stark rejected that the decision to avoid a collective agreement was determined at Tesla headquarters overseas. "We have a mandate to take our own such choices," he stated.

The union is not entirely alone in its fight. The strike has received backing from several of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in nearby Scandinavian nations, Norway & Finland, are refusing to handle the company's vehicles; waste is no longer collected from the automaker's Swedish facilities; and recently constructed charging stations are not being linked to power networks across the nation.

There is one such facility near the capital's airport, where 20 charging units stand idle. But Tibor Blomhäll, the leader of enthusiasts group Tesla Club Sweden, says Tesla owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's an alternative power point 10km from here," he comments. "Plus we are able to continue to buy our cars, we can service our vehicles, we can charge our electric cars."

With stakes significant on both sides, it is difficult to see an end to the deadlock. The union risks establishing a pattern should it surrender the fundamental concept of collective agreement.

"The concern is how this could expand," states Mr Bender, "and eventually {erode