c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 127 populated areas, were engaged by informal contracts, which did not fulfil the formal requirements of either the Statute on Hired Servants of 1833 or the Statute on Freedom of Trade of 1864. Thus, for these relationships neither of the statutes could be applied and, alongside the law in the books, the law in reality contained a large number of free agreements of service that in general were valid until further notice, which meant that either party could leave the relationship immediately. Second, during the 1890s a “second” industrial breakthrough occurred,which resulted in radical changes concerning the occupational as well as the geographical stratification of the sections of the population which had to work for a living.A slow but clear expansion of large enterprises put the individual workers into parts of collective units.253 Third, Swedish working life was influenced by a rapid emergence of big organisations and mass actions. During the 1870s trade unions and collective agreements began to emerge, using collective agreements as a means of influencing working conditions. But it was not until the latter part of the 1880s that the trade union movement consolidated and the first nationwide unions were established. Right up to the 1890s, collective agreements were relatively rare,but during that decade they became more and more common.After the turn of the century in1900 the agreementsoftentookthe shape of nationwide collective agreements.254 However, the big labour organisations showed their strength in another and more threatening manner, namely by not coming to terms with the employers and by using their recently acquired right to down tools. At the end of the 1890s, strikes in Sweden reached a thitherto unseen number; in1898 the number of conflicts were as many as during the whole of the1880s and to an everincreasing extent they seemed to be successful for the workers. 253 Lindbom1938; Gårdlund 1942, pp. 263, 271, 290, 299. See also Taussi Sjöberg 1981, pp. 25-26, 149-150, 159-160 and Nygren 1981, p. 197. 254 Adlercreutz,A1954, pp. 314 ff, 328 ff;Adlercreutz,A1958.
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