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employment became distinct and autonomous.The employee’s subordination was given different shades of meaning, but basically it reflected the employer’s exercise of power in which there is control not only over what; but also where, how and when work must be done. With explicit reference to Patrick SelimAtiyah22,Veneziani notes the “curious fact” that despite an apparent freedom of contract the movement from status to contract was never completed in labour law. Its contractual model, on the contrary, simply underlined the employer’s factual power and legal right to dictate the terms of the agreement. Collective bargaining and protective legislation developed in spite of and largely outside the framework of general contract law regulations.23 One point of departure for Bob Hepple24 is the idea that the same rule can have different functions at different times depending upon changes in material society. From a perspective of comparative legal history, this has been expressed by AlanWatson:“a rule transplanted from one country to another… may equally operate to different effect in the two societies, even though it is expressed in apparently similar terms in the two countries”.25 An example is the material change in function of the Romanistic concept of locatio conductio (letting and hire) in the civil law countries, which gave a legal support to the employer’s power and control of dependent workers in large-scale capitalist enterprises. According to Hepple, a far more complex relationship, and a subject for comparative studies, is what Watson has described as “the inner relationship” between different systems. The search for such a relationship has rested upon the belief that mankind follows the same path of development, the belief of some natural relationship between all legal systems, that each system follows the same process, until special national characteristics are p a r t 1 , c h a p t e r 1 26 22 Atiyah 1979, p. 523. 23 Veneziani 1986. See also Kahn-Freund 1977 and Atleson 1983. 24 Hepple 1986a, pp. 17-19. See also Renner 1929, 1949. 25 Watson 1974, p. 20.

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