🔗 Share this article

In Sweden, around 70 automotive mechanics persist to confront among the world's richest companies – the electric vehicle manufacturer. This labor strike targeting the American automaker's 10 Scandinavian service centers has currently reached two years of duration, and there is minimal indication of a resolution.

One striking worker has remained on the electric car company's protest line since October 2023.

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

The mechanic spends each Monday with a fellow worker, standing near a Tesla service center within an industrial park in Malmö. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies accommodation via a mobile builders' van, plus coffee & sandwiches.

But it's operations continue normally across the road, where the workshop seems to operate in full swing.

This industrial action concerns an issue that goes to the heart of Swedish industrial culture – the right for worker organizations to bargain for pay & working terms on behalf of their members. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported industrial relations in Sweden for nearly one hundred years.

Today some 70% of Scandinavia's workers are members of a trade union, while ninety percent are covered by a collective agreement. Strikes across the nation occur infrequently.

It's a system welcomed across the board. "We favor the right to bargain freely with worker representatives and sign collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise business organization.

But the electric car company has upset the apple cart. Outspoken chief executive Elon Musk has said he "opposes" with the idea of labor organizations. "I simply don't like any arrangement which creates a kind of hierarchical sort of thing," he told an audience in New York in 2023. "I think labor groups attempt to generate conflict within businesses."

The automaker entered Sweden starting in 2014, while the metalworkers' union has for years sought to establish a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they did not reply," states the union president, the union's president. "And we got the belief that they attempted to avoid or not discuss the matter with our representatives."

She says the union ultimately found no alternative than to announce a strike, beginning in late October, last year. "Usually it's enough to issue a warning," comments Ms Nilsson. "The company usually agrees to the agreement."

However this did not happen in this case.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, started working with the automaker in 2021. He claims that pay and conditions were often dependent on the whim of supervisors.

He remembers a performance review where he states he was refused a salary increase on grounds that he "not reaching Tesla's goals". At the same time, a colleague was reported to be turned down for a pay rise because having the "wrong attitude".

However, not everyone went out in the industrial action. The company employed approximately one hundred thirty mechanics employed when the strike was initiated. The union states currently around 70 of its members are participating in the action.

The automaker has since substituted the striking workers with new workers, a situation there is not occurred since the Great Depression.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] openly and systematically," says a labor researcher, 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. However it violates all established practices. But the company shows no concern about norms.

"They aim to become norm breakers. So if anyone informs them, hey, you are breaking a standard, they see this as praise."

The company's local division declined requests for comment in an email citing "record vehicle shipments".

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

In March 2024, the local division's "national manager, the executive, informed a business paper that it benefited the company more not to have a union contract, and rather "to collaborate directly with employees and provide workers optimal conditions".

The executive denied that the choice to avoid a labor contract was determined by US leadership overseas. "Our division possesses authorization to take our own such choices," he said.

IF Metall is not entirely isolated in its fight. This industrial action has received backing by a number of other unions.

Dockworkers in nearby Denmark, Nordic countries & Finland, decline to handle the company's vehicles; waste is not collected from the automaker's Swedish facilities; and newly built charging stations remain connected to power networks in the country.

There is an example near the capital's airport, where 20 charging units stand idle. However a Tesla enthusiast, the leader of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, says Tesla owners are unaffected by the strike.

"There exists another charging station 10km from here," he says. "And we can continue to purchase vehicles, we can maintain our vehicles, we can power our cars."

With consequences high on both sides, it's hard to see a resolution to the deadlock. IF Metall faces the danger of establishing a pattern should it surrender the fundamental concept of collective agreement.

"The worry is how this could expand," states the researcher, "and eventually {erode