RB 64

right to direct and distribute work were kept as an optional regulation in the proposed act on individual contracts but was crossed out as a binding rule from the act of collective agreements.437 The crossing out of this section caused several speakers in the first chamber to stand up in a passionate defence of the employer’s “section 23 prerogatives”. Thus, Pehr Liedberg and Knut Larsson argued that the section in question should quite naturally be included in the act, and keeping in mind that industrial conflicts had just taken place and were still going on, it was deplorable that the section must be stricken due to reasons of compromise.The moderate conservative member of parliament,Tord Magnusson firmly contested that getting rid of the section would entail any concessions to the principles the section expressed and that the employers had striven for, for so many years. Baron Herman Fleming af Lieblitz was of the same opinion and said that the parliament had in no way abandoned the employer’s right to direct and distribute work. Johannes Hellner as well, emphasised that crossing out section 23 prerogatives from the act was a compromise solution which did not at all mean that parliament had given up the right or had expressed its disapproval of the section’s principles, i. e. the employer’s right to direct and distribute work and to freely engage workers. Both rights were “recognised as clearly and manifestly grounded in the nature of things”without need of further legislation. The section was not intended to confirm these regulations but to make them so binding as to exclude freedom of contract for the parties.438 Hellner’s statement is of certain interest since he was one of the leading jurists of his day in Sweden.Among other things, he was justice of the Swedish Supreme Court for a brief period of time. In addition, he positioned himself as a liberal without being a member of the Liberal Party and assumed ministerial positions p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 8 212 437 SU2 1910:15, pp. 5, 53. 438 FK1910:37, pp. 39-43.

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