could give him this right, but hardly the right to interpret whether his rules were in line with the contract. For the contractual doctrine meant in general that either of the parties had the right to address an impartial, dispute-solving instance, if he considered the other party as having broken the contract. Such a state of affairs would cause a serious obstacle to the employer’s demand for a daily control and management of the workers.282 Thus,modern labour law emerged from the opposition between a private law contract concerning human beings and a postulate about the human body’s freedom from a master’s disposition. Nevertheless, the rejection of the idea that the employment relationship was a kind of sale or hiring of a commodity did not essentially obliterate the contractual point of departure, which had constituted the conditions of labour life around 1900. But how should the empty boxes of a contractual theory be filled with a content that satisfied the contradictory demands of reality? How to satisfy the capitalistic system’s need for growth and to maintain the integrity of the object of the employment relationship, the worker? The issue how to legally treat modern labour relationships was not unique to Sweden. On the contrary, it attracted considerable attention in most otherWestern countries. Before scrutinising the formative period of Swedish labour law1885-1930, some attention should be paid to contemporary trends in France, Great Britain and Germany.The debate can be described as a struggle between contractual notions and ideas on status. p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 5 140 282 Fox 1974, pp. 183-184; Selznick 1969, p. 135; Atleson 1983, pp. 12-13.
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