An almost three-year strike against Tesla Inc. was called off in Sweden as IF Metall labor union said the carmaker “bought out” the remaining workers taking part in the protest.

The battle that became a test of the country’s wage-setting model began in October 2023 after the electric-car maker refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement covering workers at its Swedish service operations. The industrial action against Tesla will end Aug. 19, the union said in a statement Thursday.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

The union is ending its strike without securing an agreement.

“This is unprecedented in the Swedish labor market — just like Tesla’s systematic strikebreaking,” IF Metall bargaining secretary Simon Petersson said. “They have used methods that have been off limits in Sweden since the 1930s.”

While only a small number of Tesla employees were on strike, the dispute grew through sympathy actions by other Nordic labor groups, affecting vehicle servicing, port handling, postal deliveries and other operations. The standoff became a high-profile challenge to Sweden’s labor model, where wages and workplace conditions are largely set through agreements between unions and employers rather than legislation.

“Without strikers there is no strike,” Veli-Pekka Säikkälä, bargaining secretary at Sweden’s trade union confederation LO, said in a separate statement. “The fact that there is no collective agreement in place is a failure.”

In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money: historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency.

People still write histories of money that are actually histories of coinage, on the assumption that in the past, these were necessarily the same thing; periods when coinage largely vanished are still described as times when the economy “reverted to barter,” as if the meaning of this phrase is self-evident, even though no one actually knows what it means.