The two statutes were flavoured with patriarchal notions that had been distinctive features of the old regime’s ideology which was picked up from the Lutheran catechism, in turn originating from the scholastic-Aristotelian doctrine; the most important unit of society and the state was the hierarchy and subordination of the household.The starting point was a notion that the common good demanded an essentially unequal relationship between master and servant. Thus, the statutes of 1833 and1864 were not obviously compatible to the idea of a free market built on contracts between equals and real Swedish working life’s need of a flexible work force. The Swedish judicature had not furnished the discussion or the legislature with any judge-made principles of law, since disputes on contracts of employment or collective agreements were more and more rarely submitted to the courts.The judicial procedure was regarded as being slow, expensive and, by the workers’ representatives, as lacking legitimacy.271 The contributions of the legal scholars were not of great practical value either.As was described in part III, Swedish jurists for a long time had paid attention to how to analyse and regulate the issue.We have seen that most Swedish scholars on the one hand tended to treat the traditional master-servant relationship, as well as new types of labour relationships, from contractual points of departure. On the other hand they considered these contracts to be equipped with components which also characterised the relationships between parents and children, such as inequality between the parties, the servant’s open-ended duty of subordination and the master’s duty of care. This analysis was predominant for the period from1815, when the law commission of 1811 delivered its first draft and right up to1878 whenWinroth published his thesis on the master-servant relationship.Thus, the issue on how to analyse and regulate the “free contract of employment” did not suddenly fall out of the p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 5 134 271 Schmidt, F 1950, p. 25.
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