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In Sweden, approximately seventy car mechanics continue to confront one of the world's richest companies – Tesla. This labor strike targeting the US automaker's 10 Scandinavian repair facilities has now entered its second anniversary, and there is minimal indication for a settlement.

Janis Kuzma has remained at the Tesla picket line starting from October 2023.

"It's a difficult period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. With Sweden's cold winter weather arrives, it's likely to grow more challenging.

The mechanic spends every start of the week alongside a fellow worker, standing near a Tesla service center within a business district located in southern Sweden. His union, IF Metall, provides shelter in the form of a mobile construction vehicle, plus coffee & light meals.

But it remains operations continue normally nearby, at which the workshop appears to be in full swing.

This industrial action concerns a matter that reaches to the heart of Swedish industrial culture – the authority for worker organizations to bargain for wages & working terms representing their workforce. This principle of negotiated labor contracts has underpinned industrial relations across the nation for almost a century.

Currently some seventy percent of Swedish workers are members of a trade union, and ninety percent fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Labor stoppages in Sweden are rare.

This is an arrangement supported across the board. "We prefer the right to bargain directly with worker representatives and sign collective agreements," states a business representative from the Association of Swedish Businesses business organization.

But Tesla has disrupted the apple cart. Vocal chief executive Elon Musk has stated he "disagrees" with the concept of unions. "I simply disapprove of anything which creates a sort of hierarchical situation," he informed listeners in New York last year. "I think the unions try to generate negativity within businesses."

The automaker came to Sweden starting in the mid-2010s, and the metalworkers' union has long wanted to secure a collective agreement with the company.

"But they wouldn't reply," states Marie Nilsson, the union's leader. "And we got the impression that they attempted to avoid or evade discussing the matter with us."

She states the union eventually saw no other option except to announce industrial action, beginning on 27 October, 2023. "Usually the threat suffices to issue a warning," says the union leader. "Employers typically agrees to the agreement."

However not on this occasion.

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

He recalls a performance review where he says he was refused a salary increase on grounds that he "failing to meet Tesla's goals". At the same time, a coworker was said to be turned down for a pay rise due to having the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, not everyone participated on strike. Tesla employed some 130 technicians employed when the strike was called. The union says currently around seventy of their represented workers are on strike.

The automaker has long since replaced these with replacement staff, a situation that has not occurred since the Great Depression.

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

"It's not against the law, this being important to understand. But it violates all traditional practices. Yet the company doesn't care about norms.

"They want to become convention challengers. Thus when anyone tells them, listen, you are breaking a norm, they see this as a compliment."

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary declined requests for comment via correspondence citing "record deliveries".

Indeed, the automaker has given just a single media interview during the entire period after the strike started.

Earlier this year, the local division's "national manager, the executive, informed a business paper that it suited the organization better to avoid a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with the team and give them optimal conditions".

Mr Stark rejected that the decision not to enter a labor contract was one made at Tesla headquarters overseas. "We have authorization to take our own such decisions," he stated.

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

Dockworkers in neighbouring Denmark, Norway & Finland, decline to process the company's vehicles; rubbish is no longer removed from Tesla's Scandinavian locations; while recently constructed power points are not being linked to the grid in the country.

Exists an example close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where 20 chargers remain unused. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, states vehicle owners remain unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's an alternative power point 10km from this location," he says. "And we can still buy our cars, we can service our cars, we can power our electric cars."

With stakes high for all parties, it's hard to see a resolution to the stand-off. The union faces the danger of setting a precedent if it concedes the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

"The concern is that that would spread," states the researcher, "and ultimately {erode