c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 191 by giving legislative support to section 23, the most controversial rule in the “December compromise”. As is already mentioned, this rule prescribed that the employer had the right “to freely engage and dismiss workers, to direct and distribute work and to use workers from any union whatsoever or standing outside a union.” The notes of the committee’s discussions, which are kept at the National Archives in Stockholm, clearly show that the worker’s duty of obedience was a controversial issue. The minutes from the meeting of August 12th 1908 emphasised that the employer’s prerogatives should explicitly include a right to distribute work. Furthermore, a proposed rule in an early version, which gave the worker the right to refuse to perform other tasks than those for which he had been engaged had to be revised. On the contrary, it must be made impossible for the worker to freely evade every task except the one agreed upon. Thus the rule should oblige the worker to give other workers assistance in tasks that lay outside his “real contract” as well as in such tasks, which “due to custom or otherwise could be considered justified to require of the worker”.The trade unions’ representative, Herman Lindqvist did not object to this proposal.394 A similar regulation, though even more patriarchal, was found in the committee’s proposal for replacing the Statute on Hired Servants of 1833.A master should have the right to use the servant for every reasonable task and to direct him as to how to perform them. However, for this category as well, an early draft of the committe prescribed that a worker who had been engaged for a specific kind of work, could not without his own consent 394 “särskilt upptagas jämväl rätten att fördela arbetet, och skulle härförutan stadgandet, om rätt för arbetare, som antagits för visst slag af arbete, att vägra att utföra annat arbete, omarbetas så, att arbetaren icke skulle lämnas fritt att kunna undandraga sig förrättandet af hvarje arbete utom det åtagna utan vara skyldig att biträda med sådana utom hans egentliga aftal liggande handräckningar åt andra arbetare och dylikt, som på grund af sedvänja eller eljest kunde anses befogadt att af arbetaren påkalla.”. Förslag till lag om vissa arbetsaftal (Draft on an Act on Certain Labour Contracts), section 18; Notes from August 12, 1908,YK 77,The National Archives, Stockholm.
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