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Across Sweden, approximately seventy automotive mechanics persist to confront among the world's richest companies – the electric vehicle manufacturer. The labor strike at the US automaker's 10 Scandinavian service centers has now entered its second anniversary, and there is minimal sign for a resolution.

One striking worker has remained at the Tesla protest line since the autumn of 2023.

"It has been a difficult time," states the worker in his late thirties. With Sweden's cold seasonal conditions sets in, it is expected to become more challenging.

The mechanic spends each Monday with a colleague, positioned near a Tesla service center within a business district located in southern Sweden. His union, IF Metall, supplies shelter in the form of a portable builders' van, plus coffee & sandwiches.

However it remains business as usual across the road, at which the workshop appears to operate in full swing.

The strike involves an issue that goes to the core of Scandinavia's labor traditions – the authority of trade unions to negotiate wages and conditions representing their members. This concept of collective agreement has underpinned labor dynamics in Sweden for nearly one hundred years.

Currently some seventy percent of Swedish workers are members of a trade union, and ninety percent fall under by a collective agreement. Labor stoppages across the nation occur infrequently.

It's a system supported across the board. "We prefer the right to bargain directly with worker representatives and establish labor contracts," states Mattias Dahl from the Association of Swedish Businesses business organization.

However the electric car company has upset the apple cart. Vocal chief executive the company leader has stated he "opposes" with the idea of unions. "I simply don't like any arrangement which creates a sort of hierarchical sort of thing," he informed an audience at an event last year. "In my view the unions attempt to create conflict in a company."

The automaker came to Sweden back in the mid-2010s, and IF Metall has for years wanted to establish a collective agreement with the automaker.

"But they wouldn't reply," says the union president, the organization's president. "And we got the belief that they attempted to avoid or not discuss this with us."

She says the organization ultimately found no alternative except to call a strike, beginning in late October, 2023. "Usually it's enough to make the threat," comments the union leader. "The company typically signs the contract."

But not on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, started working for Tesla several years ago. He asserts that pay and conditions were often dependent on the whim of managers.

He remembers a performance review where he says he was denied a salary increase because he was "not reaching company targets". At the same time, a colleague was reported to be rejected for a pay rise because he had the "wrong attitude".

However, not everyone went out in the industrial action. The company employed approximately one hundred thirty technicians working at the time the strike was initiated. The union says that today approximately seventy of its members are participating in the action.

The automaker has since substituted these with replacement staff, a situation there is not occurred since the era of the 1930s.

"Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] openly & systematically," says a labor researcher, an analyst at a research institute, a policy organization financed by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not illegal, this being important to recognize. However it goes against all established norms. Yet the company doesn't care about norms.

"They aim to become convention challengers. So if anyone informs them, listen, you are violating a norm, they see that as praise."

The automaker's Swedish subsidiary refused attempts for interview via correspondence mentioning "record vehicle shipments".

In fact, the automaker has granted just a single press discussion during the entire period since the strike started.

Earlier this year, the Swedish subsidiary's "national manager, Jens Stark, told a financial publication that it suited the company better not to have a collective agreement, and rather "to collaborate directly with the team and provide workers optimal conditions".

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

The union is not entirely isolated in this conflict. The strike has been supported by a number of other unions.

Dockworkers in nearby Denmark, Nordic countries and Finland, decline to process Teslas; waste is no longer collected from Tesla's Scandinavian locations; while newly built power points remain linked to the grid in the country.

Exists an example close to Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which 20 charging units stand idle. However Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, states vehicle owners remain unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists another charging station six miles from this location," he says. "And we can still buy our cars, we can maintain our vehicles, we can power our cars."

With stakes significant for all parties, it is difficult to envision a resolution to the stand-off. The union risks establishing a pattern if it concedes the fundamental concept of collective agreement.

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