This opinion indicated that the master-servant institution was exclusively meant for what we today would call blue-collar workers, who lived together with the master. In doing this,Winroth treated at greater length an opinion about extending the formal application of master-servant rules. This alternative had been slightly touched upon by the law committee in its drafts of 1815 and 1826, by all estates at the session of the Riksdag in 1828-30 and by Justice Stråle in a minority opinion in 1836. This first part of Winroth’s extensive efforts, however, must be considered as the least significant part of his contribution to the making of Swedish labour law. Of more importance was probably his purpose-directed method for analogously applying the rules concerning master and servant to the new types of labour agreements which did not formally fit into his own, obviously rather wide, definition of a master-servant relationship.Winroth stressed that there were agreements, the content and purpose of which bore resemblance to the “real hiring of a servant”. Such contracts were nowadays fully binding and had probably always been, even though the legislator had treated them with pronounced disapproval. Moreover, he also admitted that the most distinguishing feature of the master-servant relationship - the working party’s open-ended duty of obedience - also must characterise other types of labour contracts. And, once again, his context of justification gave custom a high value among legal sources. In practice, he wrote, the paying party was often given so much discretion to determine when and how the worker should perform his tasks that the relationship gained the character of one between a master and servant.The fact that the agreements existed and in all essentials were subordinated to the master-servant relationship emanated from a remarkable, common legal character of a special lawmaking force, namely that the work tasks were not determined. Winroth concluded that due to the quality of the contract’s “matter” (Sw. föremål) the relationship of obligations in concern c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 113
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