Having said this, which may appear as a falsification of Folke Schmidt’s theses from1959, we must immediately take a few steps back. In spite of the predominant contractual approach and the classification under the law of obligations, most writers showed no theoretical doubts in presupposing that the master-servant relation was coloured by the same notions about “ethical components”, obedience, loyalty and care, which were prescribed by the rules concerning family life.These pre-contractual terms in general were founded on legislation, more precisely the rules in the Book of Commerce in the Law of 1734, the Statutes concerning Servants and Hired Labourers and the Statute onVagrancy. A private law issue was analysed in the light of a traditional administrative, police law regulation. Regarding those “free” labour contracts which for different reasons could not be covered by the master and servant concept, the picture is even more complex.This confusion mirrored the difficulty in grasping society during a transition period. How ought the legal system respond to the rapid changes of social, economic and intellectual structures, including the concepts of family and working life? How great an influence should be given to market forces, or the parties’ positions of power, in deciding the terms of labour relations? What parts of the general principles from traditional contracts between master and servant were applicable to the new types of labour agreements that emerged alongside this traditional relationship? All the writers that we have studied, and this includes Schrevelius, classified these new types of free labour agreements as matters covered by the law of obligations. But they deeply disagreed on several other points, in particular concerning how the “free” contracts ought to be distinguished from the master-servant relationship.Thereby we can notice several different approaches to regulating the new kind of labour relations that emerged. One method - represented by among others the law professors in Uppsala in 1821, King Karl XIV Johan in 1833 and the p a r t 1 i i , c h a p t e r 4 118
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=