responsibility based on the collective agreement and the establishment of a labour court to decide legal disputes. The bill of 1911 showed that the time had past for proposing criminal law sanctions in order to maintain peace on the labour market.This same tendency was evident when the penalty levels of the Åkarp Act were mitigated in1914, and thus the possibility to arrest striking and agitating workers was considerably limited. Even earlier, the Liberal government under the lawyer, Karl Staaff, called upon Gustav Olin to formulate a bill for the 1912 parliament regarding a revision of the Åkarp Act.The basic outlook that had characterised the Olin-Åkerman memorandum of 1907 could be clearly seen in the 1912 bill that stated that the Åkarp Act constituted an exception to Swedish legislation and was a class law in respect to it being in conflict with the principle of everyone being equal in the sight of the law.463 Another important shift in the attitude of the legal system towards collective solutions occurred in 1910 when the Swedish Supreme Court ruled that trade unions could be treated as legal persons.464 The bills of 1910 and 1911 fell in parliament mainly due to resistance from the Liberals and Social Democrats, who successively improved their political positions. The legislative way to regulate the terms of the individual contract of employment seemed to be closed. Likewise, it had turned out to be politically impossible to prescribe by a mandatory rule that no collective agreement could deviate from section23. Hereinafter, no bill or legislative proposal could explicitly try to regulate the worker’s duty of obedience by using the wording of the controversial section 23. p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 8 228 463 Petrén, S 1997, p. 20. 464 NJA1910, p. 428.
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