c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 181 of the modern contract of employment.And in Sweden, as abroad, it turned out to be very complicated to formulate a contract of employment from a purely individualistic contract model. As of 1905, collective solutions were given greater significance at the expense of individual contracts. This gradual shift was obvious in a memorandum by Gustav Olin and Assar Åkerman of 1907 and in the discussions of the special labour law committee, which was appointed in 1907 and dissolved after the general strike of 1909.Two bills of 1910and1911respectively followed the same path by focusing on the binding force of collective agreements and mandatory arbitration by a separate labour court. In 1915the Swedish Supreme Court declared that a collective agreement was a legally binding contract. As of 1916, the bills abandoned the regulation of individual labour contracts to focus on collective models. It is true that during the 1920s, after the full emergence of political democracy and parliamentarism, the discussion also concerned the labour movement’s demands for “industrial democracy” (1923-24) as well as the abolition in 1926 of the patriarchal master-servant statute of 1833.The general trend, however, was a shift from individual contracts to a collectivist system, which also will be further illustrated by examples from the sparse Swedish legal writing of the time in question. In 1928, the formative period of modern Swedish labour law reached a turning point when the parliament adopted the Collective Agreement Act and statutes on the establishment of a labour court.The court started its activity on January 1st, 1929 and within a few years delivered a series of decisions that formed the modern contract of employment. This path to a separate contract of employment within a system of collectivism will be discussed by focusing on two periods: 1885-1914 and 1915-1930.
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