to custom as a source of law in relation to legislation. Should legislators intervene at all in the area of work agreements?What was the goal of the legislation - to fix the legal situation to already established patterns of actions, or to change the situation in order to satisfy the desires of some interest group regarding the terms of the agreement, taking into account justice, efficiency or perhaps even “the nature of things”? The debate on whether disputes about collective agreements should be decided by compulsory arbitration in a labour court also belonged to this subject. The government made many pronouncements about the contents of the rules and the importance of custom. Prime Minister Arvid Lindman (1862-1936), Conservative politician and industrialist, argued that legislation was necessary now with regard to the violent conflicts that were being waged on the labour market and that were damaging the whole country and the public. However, these conflicts had ended in settlements from which a number of principles and rules could be extracted.These agreements, which the parties had entered into either voluntarily or involuntarily, could now be considered “normative”, and what legislation intended to do was to transform this “unwritten law” into real, legal regulations.413 The minister of justice, Albert Petersson, followed the same line of reasoning and held that the proposed act did not give the employer one single right that he did not already have in accordance with “currently valid general legal principles”. It was not the intention of the act to use binding rules to replace the individual agreement, but only to fill in the gaps that were possibly there. Regarding the employer’s right to direct and distribute work, it was only a matter of formulating a general clause about what in general ought to be normal and natural; then the agreement, collective or individual, could regulate exceptions. It was “natural” that the employer had the right of direction since he assumed the risks of the enterprise, and it would be p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 8 202 413 AK1910:58, pp. 33-38.
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