constituted established practice between the labour market parties and therefore were to be regarded as almost unwritten law or “general fundamental legal principles”. That argument had been advanced in many places in the 1910 bill as well as in the parliamentary debates of the same year by, among others, Prime Minister Lindman and Minister of Justice Petersson. On the contrary, conspicuously many of the employers out in the field argued that existing practice did not provide sufficient protection of the employers’ direction of their companies. In light of this, it seems that “the nature of things” was not the same as uncontested principles. The bill’s proposal regarding the section 23 prerogatives of the employer appear to be more an expression of the employers’ desire for an organisation of things rather than a legislative enactment of already established positions and generally accepted fundamental legal principles. This conclusion receives some support from a study of the answers from the different parts of the workers’ movement.The trade unions recognised in principle the employer’s right to direct and distribute work but held that these rights needed to be restricted and checked in order not to be abused.They expressed a general distrust of legislation and demanded that working conditions should be regulated by collective agreements. The overall picture is complicated, however, by the fact that certain comments sought some form of public control in order to restrict the employer’s right to issue plant regulations, which can be interpreted as providing an opening for legislation. In 1911, the government introduced new proposals for legislation according to the same basic model as the year before: an act on collective agreements, an act on individual kinds of labour agreements and an act concerning a special labour court. The p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 8 218 8. 3. 7 the b i ll of 1911. sect ion 23 struck from the proposal for an act on collect ive agre ements
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