gations for an industrial peace.According to Undén, the collective agreement, through its minimum norms, could have an imperative effect, which entailed protection for the weaker party, the worker.490 With explicit reference to the discussion among German scholars, he claimed that the trade unions must be recognised as legal persons so that organisations which broke a collective agreement could be sentenced to pay damages. In this way the collective agreements could both a have a norm-standardising effect on the terms of the individual contracts of employment and function as an instrument for establishing the obligation for industrial peace. The employer’s obligation to ensure industrial peace, however, could easily become illusory. Here, legal developments needed to create increased guarantees against the employer’s free use of the right to “freely engage and fire workers” if the collective agreement was to fulfil its peace-keeping task.491 An employer could use his economic superiority to get a worker to agree to a worsening of working conditions before the expiry of a labour contract by simply telling the worker that he would otherwise be dismissed when the contract expired.492 Undén also emphasised a circumstance that was discussed intensely in the 1928 legislation, namely, that the division into legal disputes and disputes of interest did not lend itself to legal language. In accordance with many Social Democratic representatives, Undén argued that it was most likely impossible to find any objective characteristics of legal disputes. For a jurist, it was self-evident that a contract as well as an act could contain far more questions than the ones expressly mentioned.493 Undén, as well, expressed an opinion concerning the sources of labour law. In an essay from1916, he held that the field in quesp a r t i v, c h a p t e r 9 242 490 Undén 1912, pp. 20, 187, 154. 491 Undén 1912, p. 187. 492 Undén 1912, p. 198. 493 Undén 1912, p. 202.
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