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Across Sweden, around 70 car mechanics persist to challenge among the world's wealthiest companies – Tesla. This labor strike at the American carmaker's ten Swedish service centers has now reached its second anniversary, and there is little indication of a settlement.

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

"It's a difficult period," remarks the worker in his late thirties. And as the nation's cold seasonal conditions arrives, it's likely to become even tougher.

The mechanic spends each Monday alongside a fellow worker, standing near a Tesla service center within an industrial park in Malmö. His union, the Swedish metalworkers' union, provides shelter via a portable construction vehicle, as well as coffee & light meals.

But it remains operations continue normally across the road, where the workshop appears to operate in full swing.

This industrial action concerns an issue that reaches to the core of Swedish industrial culture – the authority of trade unions to bargain for wages & working terms on behalf of their members. This principle of collective agreement has supported industrial relations across the nation for almost one hundred years.

Today some seventy percent of Scandinavia's employees belong of a trade union, and ninety percent fall under under negotiated labor contracts. Strikes in Sweden are rare.

This is a system welcomed across the board. "We favor the right to bargain directly with the unions and sign collective agreements," says Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Businesses employer group.

However the electric car company has upset established practices. Outspoken CEO Elon Musk has said he "opposes" with the concept of labor organizations. "I just don't like any arrangement which creates a sort of lords and peasants situation," he informed listeners in New York in 2023. "I think the unions attempt to create conflict within businesses."

Tesla came to the Scandinavian market starting in the mid-2010s, and the metalworkers' union has long wanted to establish a collective agreement with the automaker.

"But they did not respond," says the union president, the union's president. "And we got the belief that they tried to avoid or evade discussing this with us."

She says the union ultimately saw no alternative except to announce a strike, which started on 27 October, last year. "Typically it's enough to issue a warning," comments the union leader. "The company typically signs the contract."

However this did not happen in this case.

Janis Kuzma, who is of Latvian origin, started working with the automaker in 2021. He claims that pay & conditions were often dependent on the whim of supervisors.

He recalls an evaluation meeting where he says he was refused an annual pay rise on grounds that he "not reaching company targets". Meanwhile, a coworker was reported to have been rejected for a pay rise due to having an "inappropriate demeanor".

Nevertheless, not everyone went out in the industrial action. The company employed some 130 technicians employed when the strike was initiated. IF Metall states that today around 70 of its members are participating in the action.

Tesla has since replaced the striking workers with new workers, for which that has no precedent since the Great Depression.

"The company has done it [found replacement staff] openly and methodically," says a labor researcher, a researcher at Arena Idé, a think tank supported by Scandinavian labor organizations.

"It is not against the law, this being important to understand. However it goes against all traditional practices. But Tesla shows no concern for conventions.

"They want to be norm breakers. Thus when somebody informs them, listen, you are breaking a norm, they perceive that as a compliment."

The automaker's local division refused requests for comment via correspondence citing "record vehicle shipments".

In fact, the company has granted just a single media interview during the entire period after the industrial action started.

In March 2024, the Swedish subsidiary's "country lead", Jens Stark, informed a financial publication that it benefited the company better not to have a union contract, and rather "to work closely with the team and provide workers optimal terms".

Mr Stark rejected that the choice not to enter a labor contract was determined by US leadership overseas. "Our division possesses a mandate to make our own such decisions," he stated.

The union is not completely isolated in this conflict. This industrial action has been supported from several of other unions.

Port workers in nearby Denmark, Nordic countries and Finland, are refusing to process the company's vehicles; rubbish is no longer removed from the automaker's Swedish facilities; and newly built charging stations are not being connected to the grid in the country.

There is an example near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, at which 20 charging units remain unused. However Tibor Blomhäll, the leader of an owner's club Tesla Club Sweden, says vehicle owners are unaffected by the labor dispute.

"There exists an alternative power point 10km from this location," he says. "Plus we are able to still purchase vehicles, we can service our vehicles, we can charge our electric 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 principle of collective agreement.

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