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In Sweden, around seventy car mechanics persist to confront among the world's richest companies – the electric vehicle manufacturer. This industrial action targeting the US carmaker's ten Scandinavian service centers has currently entered two years of duration, with little indication of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been at the electric car company's protest line starting from October 2023.

"It has been a tough period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. And as Sweden's cold seasonal conditions sets in, it's likely to grow even tougher.

Janis devotes each Monday with a fellow worker, positioned near a Tesla service center within a business district located in southern Sweden. The labor organization, the Swedish metalworkers' union, supplies accommodation via a portable construction vehicle, as well as coffee and light meals.

However it's business as usual nearby, at which the service facility seems to operate in full swing.

The strike involves a matter that goes to the heart of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the right for worker organizations to negotiate pay & conditions representing their workforce. This concept of collective agreement has underpinned industrial relations across the nation for almost one hundred years.

Currently some seventy percent of Swedish employees belong of a trade union, and 90% fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Labor stoppages across the nation occur infrequently.

It's an arrangement welcomed by all parties. "We favor the ability to bargain directly with the unions and sign labor contracts," says a business representative of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses employer group.

But Tesla has upset the apple cart. Outspoken CEO Elon Musk has said he "disagrees" with the concept of unions. "I simply disapprove of any arrangement that establishes a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing," he informed an audience in New York last year. "In my view the unions try to generate conflict within businesses."

The automaker came to Sweden back in 2014, while the metalworkers' union has for years sought to secure a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they wouldn't reply," says Marie Nilsson, the organization's leader. "We formed the belief that they tried to avoid or not discuss the matter with our representatives."

She says the union eventually found no other option except to announce a strike, which started in late October, last year. "Usually it's enough to issue the threat," says Ms Nilsson. "Employers typically agrees to the contract."

But not in this case.

The striking mechanic, who is of Latvian origin, started working for Tesla several years ago. He claims that wages and work terms were often subject to the whim of supervisors.

He recalls a performance review where he states he was refused a salary increase because he was "failing to meet Tesla's goals". At the same time, a coworker was reported to be turned down for a pay rise due to having an "inappropriate demeanor".

Nevertheless, not everyone participated in the industrial action. The company employed some 130 technicians employed at the time the strike was called. The union says currently around seventy of their represented workers are on strike.

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

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] openly and systematically," states a labor researcher, an analyst at Arena Idé, a policy organization financed by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not against the law, this being important to understand. However it goes against all traditional norms. Yet Tesla shows no concern about norms.

"They aim to become convention challengers. Thus when anyone tells them, hey, you are breaking a standard, they perceive that as praise."

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

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

In March 2024, the Swedish subsidiary's "country lead", Jens Stark, told a business paper that it benefited the organization more to avoid a collective agreement, and instead "to collaborate directly with employees and give them the best possible conditions".

Mr Stark denied that the choice to avoid a labor contract was one made by US leadership overseas. "We have a mandate to take our own such choices," he said.

The union is not completely alone in this conflict. The strike has received backing by a number of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in nearby Denmark, Norway & Finland, are refusing to handle the company's vehicles; waste is no longer collected from the automaker's Scandinavian locations; and newly built power points remain connected to the grid in the country.

There is an example near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which twenty charging units stand idle. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of enthusiasts group Tesla Club Sweden, says vehicle owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists another charging station 10km from this location," he comments. "Plus we are able to continue to buy our cars, we can maintain our cars, we can charge our cars."

With consequences significant on both sides, it is difficult to see a resolution to the deadlock. The union faces the danger of establishing a pattern if it concedes the fundamental concept of collective agreement.

"The concern is how this could expand," says the researcher, "and eventually {erode