🔗 Share this article

Across Sweden, around seventy car mechanics continue to challenge one of the globe's richest companies – the electric vehicle manufacturer. The industrial action targeting the US automaker's ten Scandinavian service centers has currently reached two years of duration, and there is little sign for a settlement.

Janis Kuzma has been at the Tesla picket line since the autumn of 2023.

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

Janis devotes each Monday with a colleague, standing outside an electric vehicle service center on a business district located in southern Sweden. His union, IF Metall, supplies shelter in the form of a portable construction vehicle, as well as coffee & sandwiches.

But it's business as usual across the road, where the service facility seems to operate in full swing.

This industrial action concerns an issue that reaches to the heart of Swedish industrial culture – the right for worker organizations to bargain for wages and conditions on behalf of their workforce. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported industrial relations in Sweden for almost a century.

Today some 70% of Scandinavia's workers are members to labor organizations, while ninety percent fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Labor stoppages in Sweden occur infrequently.

It's an arrangement welcomed by all parties. "We prefer the right to negotiate freely with the unions and establish collective agreements," says a business representative from the Association of Swedish Enterprise employer group.

However the electric car company has disrupted established practices. Outspoken chief executive the company leader has stated he "opposes" with the idea of unions. "I just disapprove of any arrangement which creates a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he told listeners in New York in 2023. "I think labor groups attempt to create negativity in a company."

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

"But they did not respond," says Marie Nilsson, the union's president. "And we got the belief that they tried to hide away or evade discussing the matter with our representatives."

She states the union eventually saw no alternative than to call industrial action, beginning in late October, 2023. "Usually the threat suffices to make the threat," comments the union leader. "The company usually agrees to the contract."

However not in this case.

Janis Kuzma, who is of Latvian origin, started working for Tesla in 2021. He asserts that wages & work terms frequently dependent on the discretion of managers.

He recalls an evaluation meeting at which he states he was denied a salary increase on grounds he was "failing to meet company targets". At the same time, a colleague was reported to have been turned down for a pay rise due to having the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, not everyone participated in the industrial action. Tesla employed approximately one hundred thirty mechanics working when the strike was called. IF Metall says that today approximately seventy of its members are on strike.

The automaker has long since substituted these with new workers, a situation there is not occurred since the 1930s.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] publicly & systematically," states a labor researcher, a researcher at Arena Idé, a think tank financed by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not against the law, which is important to recognize. But it violates all established norms. Yet the company doesn't care for conventions.

"They want to be norm breakers. So if somebody tells them, hey, you are breaking a norm, they perceive this as a compliment."

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary declined requests for interview in an email mentioning "all-time high vehicle shipments".

Indeed, the company has given just a single press discussion during the entire period since the industrial action started.

Earlier this year, the local division's "country lead", the executive, told a business paper that it suited the company better not to have a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with the team and provide them optimal terms".

The executive denied that the choice to avoid a labor contract was one made at Tesla headquarters in the US. "Our division possesses a mandate to take independent such choices," he said.

IF Metall is not entirely alone in its fight. The strike has received backing from several of other unions.

Port workers in neighbouring Scandinavian nations, Norway and Finland, are refusing to process Teslas; waste is no longer removed from Tesla's Swedish facilities; and newly built power points are not being connected to the grid across the nation.

Exists one such facility close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where twenty chargers remain unused. However a Tesla enthusiast, the president of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, states Tesla owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's another charging station six miles from this location," he comments. "Plus we are able to continue to purchase vehicles, we can service our vehicles, we can power our electric cars."

With stakes significant on both sides, it's hard to see an end to the stand-off. The union risks setting a precedent should it surrender the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

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