days per year free time, which had been stipulated by Swedish legislation since medieval laws.According toWinroth, the servants normally spent these days in idleness, and this leisure seemed to be neither useful nor necessary.248 Winroth’s ambition was obviously to loosen the contract of employment from public law and consider it as a purely private law subject. Consequently, he criticised the century-old bond that was maintained between on the one hand the rules in the Statute onVagrancy and, on the other hand, the Statutes on the Hiring of Servants even after these laws had been amended in 1833.As an alternative he pointed out that modern legislation in other countries paid attention to affirmative facts, such as begging or a wandering life.249 In this particular respectWinroth was only few years ahead of Swedish lawmakers.The law on compulsory annual employment for poor people was abolished in1885, and the prerequisite for coercive measures was switched from status (unemployment) to asocial behaviour (vagrancy in combination with no apparent intention to look for a job).250 Since medieval times, the Swedish legislation concerning the contract of the hiring of services had been permeated with the principles from the rules concerning measures against vagrancy, in particular poor people’s duty to take annual employment and the master’s right to control their wards.Thus Winroth’s ambition to release the modern contract of employment from all components connected with public law concerned greater issues than sanctions against vagrants. Likewise, his determination not to classify the master-servant relationship as a matter of family law was about greater issues than to extend its application to whitecollar workers, who had a household of their own. p a r t 1 i i , c h a p t e r 4 116 248 Winroth 1878, pp. 188-190. 249 Winroth 1878, pp. 67-68, 77, 91-92, 102. 250 Kumlien 1997, pp. 223-227.
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