The striking Swedish workers taking on carmaker Tesla

In Sweden 70 car mechanics are continuing to take on one of the world’s richest companies – Tesla. The strike at the US carmaker’s 10 Swedish service centres has now reached its second anniversary, and there is little prospect of a resolution.

Janis Kuzma has been on the Tesla picket line since October 2023.

“It’s a tough time,” says the 39-year-old. And as Sweden’s cold winter weather sets in, it’s likely to become tougher.

Janis spends each Monday with a colleague, standing outside a Tesla garage on an industrial park in Malmö. His union, IF Metall, provides accommodation in the form of a mobile builders’ van, as well as coffee and sandwiches.

But it’s business as usual across the road, where the workshop appears to be in full swing.

The strike concerns an issue that goes to the heart of Swedish industrial culture – the right of trade unions to negotiate pay and conditions on behalf of their members. This concept of collective agreement has underpinned industrial relations in Sweden for nearly a century.

Today some 70% of Swedish workers are members of a trade union, and 90% are covered by a collective agreement. Strikes in Sweden are rare.

It’s an arrangement welcomed across the board. “We prefer the right to negotiate freely with the unions and sign collective agreements,” says Mattias Dahl of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise business organisation.

But Tesla has upset the apple cart. Outspoken chief executive Elon Musk has said he “disagrees” with the idea of unions. “I just don’t like anything which creates a kind of lords and peasants sort of thing,” he told an audience in New York in 2023. “I think the unions try to create negativity in a company.”

Tesla came to Sweden back in 2014, and IF Metall has long wanted to secure a collective agreement with the company.

“But they wouldn’t respond,” says Marie Nilsson, the union’s president. “And we got the impression that they tried to hide away or not discuss this with us.”

She says the union eventually saw no other option than to announce a strike, which started on 27 October, 2023. “Usually it’s enough to make the threat,” says Ms Nilsson. “The company usually signs the agreement.”

But not in this case.

Janis Kuzma, who is originally from Latvia, started working for Tesla in 2021. He claims that pay and conditions were often dependent on the whim of managers.

He recalls a performance review at which 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 turned down for a pay rise because he had the “wrong attitude”.

However, not everyone went out on strike. Tesla had some 130 mechanics working at the time the industrial action was called. IF Metall says that today around 70 of its members are on strike.

Tesla has long since replaced these with new workers, for which there is no precedent since the 1930s.

“Tesla has done it [found replacement staff] openly and systematically,” says German Bender, a researcher at Arena Idé, a think tank financed by Swedish trade unions.

“It’s not illegal, which is important to understand. But it goes against all established norms. But Tesla doesn’t care about norms.

“They want to be norm breakers. So if somebody tells them, hey, you are breaking a norm, they see that as a compliment.”

The BBC asked to speak to Tesla’s subsidiary, TM Sweden, but the request was declined in an email citing “all-time high deliveries”.

Indeed, the company has given only one media interview in the two years since the strike began.

In March 2024, TM Sweden’s “country lead”, Jens Stark, told the business paper Dagens Industri that it suited the company better not to have a collective agreement, and instead “to work closely with the team and give them the best possible conditions”.

Mr Stark denied that the decision not to enter a collective agreement was one made at Tesla headquarter in the US. “We have a mandate to make our own such decisions,” he said.

IF Metall is not entirely alone in its fight. The strike has been supported by a number of other unions.

Dockworkers in neighbouring Denmark, Norway and Finland, are refusing to handle Teslas; rubbish is no longer collected from Tesla’s Swedish facilities; and newly built charging stations are not being connected to the grid in the country.

There is one such facility near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, where 20 chargers stand idle. But Tibor Blomhäll, the president of enthusiasts group Tesla Club Sweden, says Tesla owners are unaffected by the strike.

“There’s another charging station 10km (six miles) from here,” he says. “And we can still buy our cars, we can service our cars, we can charge our cars.”

With stakes high on both sides, it’s hard to see an end to the stand-off. IF Metall risks setting a precedent if it concedes the principle of collective agreement.

“The concern is that that would spread,” says Mr Bender, “and eventually erode the strong support for the labour market model that we have among employers as well”.

Tesla, on the other hand, may feel that conceding this fight in Sweden would strengthen the hand of those who want to unionise Tesla at its production facilities in the US and Germany, where it employs tens of thousands of staff.

Mr Bender detects another reason for the position Tesla has taken. “I think it’s important to understand that Elon Musk doesn’t want to be sort of told how to do things,” he says.

“And I think he doesn’t view the industrial action that the union has taken as an invitation to negotiate, but rather as an ultimatum to sign a dotted line that he doesn’t want to sign.”

Mr Blomhäll of Tesla Club Sweden also says he sees no quick solution. “This will be another Korean War,” he says. “A conflict that just drags on.”