of the modern contract of employment. Moreover, several Swedish writers have emphasised the labour movement’s ambivalent approach to labour law legislation.The general picture has been that the broad mass of workers rejected labour law legislation for a long time. In his study on the legislation on hired servants, Thomas Adlercreutz has shown how the emerging labour movement - against the background of the deterrent Statute of Hired Servants of 1833 - uncompromisingly rejected any kind of legislation on the contract of employment.371 JörgenWesterståhl and Håkan Göransson, however, have pointed out that several Social Democrats in prominent positions, among others Östen Undén, Sigfrid Hansson, Gustav Möller and Herman Lindqvist, at an early stage showed a positive attitude towards establishing mandatory arbitration in disputes about collective agreements.Accordingly, the Social Democrats’ strong opposition to the legislation of 1928 is primarily to be understood as the result of tactical considerations and an ambition to not lose votes to the Communist Party in the election of the same year.372 This study does not aim at arguing against these results, but to further analyse how this ambivalence within the labour movement is reflected in the preparatory works and the debates in the Swedish parliament. A third aspect of the emergence of collectivism is about what practical consequences resulted from the Swedish trade unions’ and employers’ “integration” into the legal system, giving them representation in a public institution such as the labour court. As early as in 1958 Lennart Geijer and Folke Schmidt declared that the legislation of 1928 meant that the parties on the labour market were deprived of their previous sovereignty.373 The conclusions that the integration functioned in favour of the trade p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 7 178 371 Adlercreutz,T1971, pp. 173-176;Westerståhl 1945, p. 359; Geijer & Schmidt 1958, pp. 12, 381. 372 Westerståhl 1945, ch 11-12; Göransson 1988, pp. 190-194, 210-220, 420; Nycander 2002, p. 33. 373 Geijer & Schmidt 1958, p. 10.
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