Swedish Car Mechanics Participate in Prolonged Labor Dispute Against Carmaker Tesla

In Sweden, around 70 automotive technicians continue to challenge one of the world's richest corporations – Tesla. The labor strike targeting the American automaker's ten Swedish repair facilities has now entered its second anniversary, and there is minimal indication for a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has remained at the Tesla protest line starting from the autumn of 2023.

"It's a tough time," remarks the 39-year-old. With Sweden's cold winter weather sets in, it's likely to become even tougher.

Janis spends every start of the week alongside a colleague, positioned near a Tesla garage on a business district in Malmö. His union, IF Metall, provides accommodation in the form of a mobile builders' van, as well as hot beverages & sandwiches.

But it remains business as usual nearby, where the workshop appears to operate at full capacity.

This industrial action concerns a matter that reaches to the core of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority of trade unions to negotiate wages & working terms representing their workforce. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported labor dynamics across the nation for almost one hundred years.

Today approximately 70% of Swedish employees are members to labor organizations, while ninety percent are covered by a collective agreement. Labor stoppages across the nation occur infrequently.

This is a system welcomed across the board. "We favor the ability to bargain freely with worker representatives and sign collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl from the Association of Swedish Enterprise business organization.

But Tesla has disrupted the apple cart. Vocal CEO the company leader has said he "disagrees" with the concept of unions. "I just disapprove of anything which creates a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he informed an audience in New York in 2023. "In my view the unions try to generate conflict within businesses."

The automaker came to Sweden back in 2014, and IF Metall has for years wanted to secure a labor contract with the automaker.

"Yet they did not reply," says the union president, the organization's president. "And we got the belief that they attempted to avoid or evade discussing this with us."

She says the union ultimately found no alternative than to call a strike, beginning on 27 October, 2023. "Usually it's enough to make the threat," says Ms Nilsson. "Employers usually signs the agreement."

But this did not happen on this occasion.

Janis Kuzma, who is from Latvia, started working for Tesla in 2021. He asserts that pay and conditions frequently dependent on the whim of supervisors.

He remembers an evaluation meeting where he says he was denied an annual pay rise on grounds that he "failing to meet Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a colleague was said to have been rejected for a pay rise because having the "wrong attitude".

Nevertheless, some workers went out in the industrial action. Tesla had some 130 mechanics working at the time the industrial action was called. IF Metall says currently approximately seventy of their represented workers are participating in the action.

Tesla has long since substituted these with replacement staff, for which there is not occurred since the 1930s.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] publicly and methodically," says German Bender, an analyst at a research institute, a policy organization financed by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It's not against the law, this being crucial to understand. But it violates all established practices. Yet Tesla doesn't care for conventions.

"They aim to become norm breakers. Thus when anyone tells them, listen, you are violating a standard, they perceive that as praise."

The company's local division refused attempts for interview in an email citing "all-time high deliveries".

Indeed, the company has granted only one press discussion in the two years after the strike started.

In March 2024, the local division's "country lead", the executive, told a business paper that it benefited the organization more to avoid a union contract, and rather "to work closely with the team and give them the best possible terms".

The executive denied that the decision to avoid a collective agreement was determined at Tesla headquarters overseas. "We have a mandate to make independent such choices," he stated.

The union is not completely alone in this conflict. This industrial action has been supported by a number of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in neighbouring Denmark, Norway and neighboring states, decline to handle the company's vehicles; waste is no longer collected from Tesla's Swedish facilities; while newly built power points remain connected to power networks across the nation.

There is an example close to the capital's airport, at which twenty chargers remain unused. However Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, states vehicle owners are unaffected by the strike.

"There's an alternative power point six miles from this location," he says. "Plus we are able to still purchase vehicles, we can service our cars, we can charge our electric cars."

With consequences significant for all parties, it's hard to envision an end to the stand-off. The union risks setting a precedent if it concedes the principle of negotiated labor contracts.

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