c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 165 of production made new demands on the regulation of working life.The ideology of laissez faire in combination with a political inability to legislate resulted in a significant responsibility for the making of labour law being placed upon the judicial system, more precisely the justices of the supreme courts.To a considerably lesser part, legal scholars have taken part in this lawmaking. Although their legal analysis no doubt often had a contractual starting point, their conclusions were remarkably influenced by the idea that the relationship in question ought to be equipped with pre-contractual components of status and inequality between the parties. French labour law inevitably was distinguished by the théorie institutionnelle, while German law showed traits of Person/en/recht, Eingliederung and in particular a Gemeinschaftsverhältnis. From these notions of the peculiar “nature” of the contract of employment, one can easily draw parallels to common law’s references to “the nature of things” or “immanent components” as the legal foundation of implied terms of law, such as the employee’s openended duties of obedience and loyalty.336 As was mentioned in the introduction of this book, modern labour law in manyWestern countries is characterised not only by the fact that the contract of employment has been separated from ordinary contracts.Another common feature is furthermore a system of collective self-regulation, in which autonomous groups to a great extent influence the making of legal rules.An important element of that system has been the legal integration of collective agreements. Different models can be picked from abroad. In Great Britain collective agreements were from the beginning treated as only morally binding in a formal sense, though in reality they were regarded as expressions of established customs, thus functioning as an indirectly supplementary source of law for the content of individual contracts. However, in principal very few efforts were made to use the collective agreement as a means 336 Zimmermann 1993.
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