Collective agreements / collective bargaining are very common in europe, and their purpose is to establish a baseline of guarantees, compensation and generally workers rights.
Collective agreements are also incredibly common (in my eu country they cover like 98% of the workers).
The main reason for a company to avoid those is because of the intention to offer lower rights, worse pay, and less guarantees (job security / protection from discrimination etc).
These articles from Sweden give those concepts for granted because they usually are taken for granted in most Europe.
> what exactly is causing the safety issues they claim
This is in the third of those three paragraphs in the article:
> The collective agreements are negotiated on a sector-by-sector basis, and employees are guaranteed the wages and working conditions that are standard across the sector. This allows for companies to operate on a level playing field, while avoiding the risk of any one employer distorting competition in the sector by imposing poor conditions on their employees.
Tesla doesn’t allow the employees to work under the same conditions as dictated by the agreed-upon standards.
There's nothing vague about it given the context. They mean standard Swedish working conditions, like the deals they have (and everyone else has (literally 90% of workers)) everywhere else. The precise conditions of collective agreements vary somewhat but overall are pretty uniform per sector so everyone here knows what they're talking about. Unfortunately I can't find you an English article for what they're talking about but you can try your hand at translating this one [1] for some introductory information.
That said, yes, it doesn't sound like their on specific demands, at least currently. They want Tesla to "accept the swedish labour model."
"Decent and safe working conditions" is the union's general raisin d'etre. Their role, general goal, etc. It would be like Tesla saying they want to "profitably manufacture vehicles." Just a general description of what they do... and it's fine if they were to state it while describing their position.
It seems reading comprehension isn't your forte. Here's the very first paragraph of the article you're accusing of not being very informative.
> The main reason for IF Metall to take industrial action at Tesla is to ensure that our members have decent and safe working conditions. Over a long period of time, we have attempted to discuss with Tesla the signing of a collective agreement, yet without success. Now we see no solution other than to take industrial action.
What exactly do you struggle to understand?