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Across Sweden, around 70 car mechanics persist to challenge one of the globe's wealthiest companies – Tesla. The industrial action targeting the US automaker's 10 Scandinavian service centers has currently reached two years of duration, and there is little indication for a settlement.

One striking worker has remained on the electric car company's protest line starting from October 2023.

"It's a difficult time," remarks the worker in his late thirties. And as Sweden's cold seasonal conditions arrives, it's likely to become more challenging.

The mechanic devotes every start of the week alongside a fellow worker, positioned near an electric vehicle service center on an industrial park in Malmö. His union, IF Metall, provides shelter via a mobile builders' van, plus coffee & light meals.

But it's business as usual across the road, where the workshop seems to be at full capacity.

The strike involves an issue that goes to the heart of Scandinavia's industrial culture – the authority of trade unions to bargain for wages and conditions representing their members. This concept of negotiated labor contracts has supported labor dynamics across the nation for almost a century.

Currently some seventy percent of Scandinavia's workers are members of a trade union, and ninety percent fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes across the nation are rare.

It's an arrangement supported by all parties. "We prefer the ability to negotiate freely with worker representatives and establish labor contracts," states a business representative of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise business organization.

However the electric car company has disrupted established practices. Vocal CEO the company leader has said he "disagrees" with the idea of unions. "I simply disapprove of anything which creates a kind of lords and peasants situation," he informed an audience at an event in 2023. "In my view labor groups attempt to generate conflict in a company."

The automaker entered Sweden starting in the mid-2010s, and IF Metall has long sought to secure a collective agreement with the company.

"Yet they did not reply," states Marie Nilsson, the organization's president. "And we got the impression that they tried to hide away or evade discussing this with our representatives."

She says the organization ultimately found no other option except to call a strike, beginning on 27 October, 2023. "Typically the threat suffices to issue the threat," comments the union leader. "The company usually signs the contract."

However not on this occasion.

The striking mechanic, originally of Latvian origin, started working with the automaker several years ago. He asserts that wages and conditions were often dependent on the discretion of managers.

He remembers a performance review at which he says he was refused an annual pay rise on grounds he was "not reaching Tesla's goals". At the same time, a colleague was reported to have been turned down for increased compensation due to having an "inappropriate demeanor".

However, some workers participated in the industrial action. Tesla had some one hundred thirty mechanics working at the time the strike was initiated. IF Metall says that today approximately seventy of their represented workers are on strike.

Tesla has since substituted these with new workers, for which there is not occurred since the era of the 1930s.

"Tesla has accomplished this [found replacement staff] openly & systematically," says a labor researcher, an analyst at Arena Idé, a think tank supported by Swedish trade unions.

"It's not against the law, which is important to recognize. However it violates all traditional norms. But Tesla doesn't care about norms.

"They aim to become norm breakers. So if anyone tells them, hey, you are violating a standard, they perceive this as praise."

The automaker's local division declined attempts for interview in an email citing "record deliveries".

Indeed, the company has granted just a single press discussion in the two years after the industrial action started.

In March 2024, the local division's "country lead", Jens Stark, told a financial publication that it benefited the company better not to have a collective agreement, and rather "to work closely with employees and give them the best possible terms".

Mr Stark rejected that the choice to avoid a collective agreement was one made at Tesla headquarters overseas. "We have a mandate to make independent such choices," he stated.

The union is not entirely isolated in its fight. This industrial action has received backing from several of other unions.

Port workers in neighbouring Denmark, Nordic countries & neighboring states, decline to process Teslas; rubbish is no longer removed from Tesla's Scandinavian locations; and newly built charging stations are not being connected to power networks in the country.

There is one such facility near the capital's airport, where 20 chargers remain unused. But Tibor Blomhäll, the leader of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, states Tesla owners remain unaffected by the strike.

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

With consequences significant for all parties, it is difficult to see a resolution to the deadlock. IF Metall risks establishing a pattern if it concedes the fundamental concept of negotiated labor contracts.

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