It is the only court of its kind in Sweden. It normally adjudicates as the first and only instance and its judgements cannot be appealed. Another remarkable difference in relation to courts of general jurisdiction is that the members of the labour court are appointed for a limited period of time.5 Even if the labour law of today rests in some of its essential parts upon the labour court’s decisions from around 1930, the court never revealed what legal sources upon which they were founded. Regarding the “29/29-principle”, for example, the court simply referred to the fact that the collective agreement “must be considered” (Sw. måste anses) as implying certain terms. In the light of this confusion, it is of special interest to analyse what underlying assumptions might have inspired the court at the period in question. Neither the employee’s open-ended duty of subordination, nor the prominent feature of collective self-regulation, are unique to Swedish labour law.Although often categorised in different legal “families”, all Western countries have in common four specific features of the conception of labour law. (i) The legal rules are to a great extent made by autonomous groups, not by the state. (ii) The contract of employment has been separated from ordinary contracts. No other contract of private law is regulated in this manner; legislation, collective agreements and general legal principles determine central terms in advance and thus withdraw them from the power of the parties.The contract of employment has become a distinct and autonomous category, although it is placed in the same legal discipline and regulated by the same general principles of law as other contracts.The separation of the contract of employment, however, rests upon another distinctive feature of labour law, as it has developed in Europe as well as in the USA: (iii) The individual worker is subordinated to the emc o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 19 5 Sigeman 1989-90, pp. 193-206. 1. 2 comparat ive legal hi story points of de parture
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=