of establishing an obligation of industrial peace in labour relations.337 In France, the collective agreements were early recognised as legally binding with consequences for the individual contracts, but neither did the French system integrate them within the legal system as a means for limiting the downing of tools.338 The most important foreign influence for Swedish jurists during the first decades of the 20th century, however, emanated from Germany, and to some extent Denmark and Norway.339 In 1910 the German Supreme Court, das Reichsgericht, recognised that a collective agreement was legally binding for the functionary who had signed the agreement.340 In1918 the first German statute on collective agreements was adopted.The law was produced in a revolutionary situation and aimed primarily at satisfying the workers’ claim to establish the collective agreements’ norm-standardising effect upon terms of individual contracts of employment. However, it was not meant as a legal instrument to establish an obligation for industrial peace. German law professors elaborated a huge mass of literature and different theories about the binding force of the collective agreement.According to the Vertretungstheorie a trade union served as a representative of the individual members, while the Verbandstheorie meant that only the union was bound by a collective agreement.The Kombinierte Theorie, finally, meant that the individual member was considered as a party to the collective agreement and was thus bound by it.341 From the 1920s, the German judiciary made a decisive contribution to modern labour law.The justices concluded that a “relative” obligation of industrial peace followed as a consequence of the collective agreement. Originally, this obligation applied only to questions that were explicitly governed by the agreement, but p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 6 166 337 Göransson 1988, pp. 106-125. 338 Göransson 1988, pp. 142-155. 339 Undén 1919; Hagerup 1919. 340 Entscheidungen des Reichsgerichts in Zivilsachen, Band 73, p. 92 in Adlercreutz,A 1954, pp. 448 ff. 341 Adlercreutz, A1954, chVII; Göransson 1988, pp. 186, 188.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=