as common law paid little attention to developing contractual models with regard to large-scale industrial enterprises and modern wage-earners. Moreover, a purely individualistic view never became predominant in Western legal systems. It is no doubt that within the area that concerned the majority of the people, which was not private law but administrative law, the rules prescribed a lot of pre-contractual terms for labour relationships, for example the master’s duty to take care of his workers and the worker's duty of subordination.This patriarchal pattern was often supported by sanctions within criminal law. During the 19th century many countries tended to abolish these administrative laws which emanated from a pre-industrial society.Around the turn of the century in 1900 the regulation of labour relationships thus tended to become a purely private law matter. However, private law’s individualistic contractual analysis of labour relationships was increasingly called into question. Some scholars noted that the contract of locatio conductio operarumhad arisen in ancient Roman society in order to regulate the hiring of slaves and could not be applied to the free labour contract in a modern industrial society.Above all, the sale model’s impersonal points of departure were strongly criticised by representatives of left-wing opinions as well as conservative debaters. From apparently different angles of view they could not accept the idea that labour could be treated solely as a commodity, separated from the worker, and thus as an object for negotiations on a free market. Neither sale nor hiring were accepted as models for the employment relationship. On the contrary, many debaters claimed that the legal system had to adapt its instrument to the conditions of a radically changed society. They exclaimed, that even if a person’s labour should be treated as a commodity, it was inseparably attached to its holder; work was the human being itself, which could not be treated as a private law object. p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 5 138
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