Swedish Car Mechanics Participate in Prolonged Industrial Action With Carmaker Tesla

Across Sweden, around seventy automotive mechanics persist to challenge one of the globe's richest corporations – the electric vehicle manufacturer. The labor strike targeting the US automaker's 10 Swedish service centers has now reached two years of duration, with little sign of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been on the electric car company's protest line starting from the autumn of 2023.

"It's a tough time," remarks the worker in his late thirties. And as Sweden's cold winter weather sets in, it is expected to grow even tougher.

The mechanic devotes every start of the week alongside a fellow worker, positioned near a Tesla service center on an industrial park located in southern Sweden. The labor organization, IF Metall, supplies accommodation in the form of a mobile builders' van, as well as hot beverages and sandwiches.

But it's business as usual nearby, at which the workshop appears to operate in full swing.

This industrial action involves an issue that reaches to the heart of Swedish labor traditions – the right of trade unions to negotiate wages and conditions representing their workforce. This concept of collective agreement has underpinned labor dynamics across the nation for almost a century.

Today some seventy percent of Scandinavia's employees belong to labor organizations, while ninety percent fall under by a collective agreement. Strikes in Sweden are rare.

It's an arrangement supported by all parties. "We prefer the right to negotiate directly with the unions and establish collective agreements," states Mattias Dahl from the Association of Swedish Businesses employer group.

But Tesla has disrupted established practices. Vocal chief executive the company leader has said he "opposes" with the concept of unions. "I simply don't like any arrangement that establishes a sort of hierarchical sort of thing," he informed listeners at an event in 2023. "I think the unions attempt to create conflict in a company."

The automaker came to the Scandinavian market starting in 2014, and the metalworkers' union has long wanted to secure a collective agreement with the automaker.

"Yet they did not respond," says the union president, the organization's president. "We formed the belief that they attempted to hide away or not discuss the matter with our representatives."

She states the organization eventually found no alternative than to announce a strike, beginning on 27 October, 2023. "Usually the threat suffices to issue the threat," says Ms Nilsson. "The company typically signs the contract."

However not in this case.

The striking mechanic, who is of Latvian origin, began employment with the automaker in 2021. He asserts that wages & work terms were often subject to the whim of supervisors.

He remembers an evaluation meeting where he says he was refused an annual pay rise because he was "not reaching Tesla's goals". Meanwhile, a colleague was said to have been rejected for a pay rise due to having the "wrong attitude".

However, not everyone participated in the industrial action. The company had approximately one hundred thirty mechanics working at the time the industrial action was called. IF Metall states currently around 70 of its members are participating in the action.

Tesla has long since substituted the striking workers with replacement staff, for which that has not occurred since the 1930s.

"The company has accomplished this [found replacement staff] publicly & systematically," states German Bender, an analyst at Arena Idé, a policy organization supported by Swedish trade unions.

"It is not illegal, which is important to recognize. But it violates all established practices. Yet Tesla doesn't care for conventions.

"They want to be convention challengers. So if anyone informs them, hey, you are breaking a norm, they see that as a compliment."

The company's Swedish subsidiary declined requests for interview in an email citing "record deliveries".

In fact, the automaker has given just a single media interview in the two years after the industrial action started.

Earlier this year, the local division's "national manager, Jens Stark, informed a business paper that it benefited the organization better to avoid a union contract, and rather "to work closely with the team and give workers the best possible terms".

The executive rejected that the choice to avoid a collective agreement was determined by US leadership in the US. "Our division possesses authorization to make independent such decisions," he stated.

IF Metall is not completely isolated in this conflict. This industrial action has been supported by a number of labor organizations.

Dockworkers in nearby Scandinavian nations, Norway & neighboring states, decline to process the company's vehicles; rubbish is no longer collected from the automaker's Scandinavian locations; and newly built charging stations are not being linked to power networks across the nation.

There is an example near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which twenty charging units remain unused. However Tibor Blomhäll, the president of an owner's club the Swedish Tesla association, states Tesla owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There's an alternative power point 10km from here," he says. "Plus we are able to continue to purchase vehicles, we can maintain our cars, we can charge our cars."

With stakes significant on both sides, it's hard to see an end to the stand-off. The union faces the danger of setting a precedent should it surrender the principle of collective agreement.

"The worry is that that would spread," states the researcher, "and eventually {erode