Two years since the standoff between Elon Musk and Sweden's unions
Employees and management, far from reaching an agreement, are staging the longest strike in the country in the last 100 years.
CopenhagenIn Sweden, 65 car mechanics have been on strike for two years against the electric vehicle company Tesla, owned by the world's richest man, Elon Musk. The strike is the longest in the Nordic country in the last 100 years and represents the first and only strike in the world against a company owned by the billionaire who recently stepped down as Donald Trump's right-hand man in the White House.
The conflict began in 2023 when Tesla refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement with its workers. Since then, fourteen unions from four countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland) have joined the protest with solidarity actions to pressure the company.
Despite the unions' efforts, they have not managed to halt Tesla's operations in the Nordic country, and the company has responded with several lawsuits against the Swedish Transport Agency, resulting in multimillion-dollar legal costs. Sales of the brand's cars have also suffered in 2025, although the electric vehicle market is expanding in Sweden.
The IF Metal industrial union is calling for higher wages for mechanics and better working conditions, but they also admit that what is at stake in this protest is the Swedish labor market's collective bargaining model, which Musk, notoriously anti-union, refuses to recognize.
Far from being resolved, the conflict has become even more entrenched in recent weeks between the unions and Tesla. Sweden's National Mediation Office recently announced it was throwing in the towel after more than a year of negotiations to try to reach an agreement between the parties. "My impression is that both IF Metal and Tesla's Swedish subsidiary want to end the conflict, but this is an issue that not only concerns Sweden, but also the company's identity," the Office's director, Irene Wennemo, told the media. Swedish Daily.
As a result of the mediation's failure, Swedish unions have attempted to escalate tensions further with ten new actions against the company, in addition to those already underway. Over the past 24 months, dockworkers have refused to unload new Tesla cars arriving in Sweden, garbage is not being collected from the company's dealerships, and newly constructed charging stations are not being connected to the country's electricity grid.
IF Metal spokesperson Jesper Pettersson asserted that "the will to continue the strike is even stronger among the mechanics today," although he also admitted that "the protest is taking a significant psychological toll on them." The union has a substantial strike fund thanks to its more than 300,000 members, which has allowed them to compensate the strikers with 130% of their wages: "Financially, continuing the strike is not a problem for us; we have the resources to continue for as long as the mechanics are willing."
Sales decline this year
The layoffs of more than half of Tesla's mechanics in the country are also causing a reputational crisis that is affecting the Scandinavian market, one of the company's most important in Europe. In fact, this year Tesla car sales fell by 65% in Sweden and 54% in Denmark, while Norway was one of the few European countries where they grew, by 24% compared to last year. Meanwhile, sales of competing electric vehicles, especially those manufactured in China, have continued to grow in Sweden, increasing by 15% over the past year, and electric vehicles now account for 60% of new passenger car registrations.
German Bender, a researcher at the Arena Idé center, believes that "very few companies in the world are prepared to accept the economic cost, but also the damage to their brand image, that the mechanics' strike is causing." However, the researcher attributes the drop in sales "more to the political decisions Musk has made by moving closer to the far right and also to increased competition, and not so much to the effects of the strike."
Since the start of the conflict, Tesla's only statements to the media were a year ago, when the brand's head in Sweden, Jens Stark, asserted that it was in the company's best interest not to sign a collective bargaining agreement (a mechanism that covers 90% of workers in the Nordic country). Analysts believe that Tesla may consider that if it concedes in the labor dispute in Sweden, workers at its production plants in other countries, such as Germany or the US, where it employs thousands, could follow suit.