for example, regarding the eight-hour workday. Other social classes had not realised how every step on the path towards social reform threatened possibilities for profits, the existence of private enterprise and ultimately social security.Worker-run companies would scare persons who were willing to invest in businesses into leaving the country. It was especially difficult to try to regulate working life by legislation, since working life was distinguished by considerable diversity and different conditions. In addition, it was hasty to resort to risk-filled legislation in an area that had already given a great deal of space to the efforts of the trade union movement and that lacked sufficient regulation of the labour contracts, individual as well as collective.The resistance from the workers to, among other things, the proposed bills of 1910, 1911 and 1916, had contributed to defeating parliament’s attempt to bring about “a codification of the customary law that had gradually received its form principally in the collective agreement and through the long-standing dealings between the employer and employee organisations”.529 The views of the employers were further developed during the late autumn of 1923 in a series of lectures by SAF’s chairman Hjalmar von Sydow. He argued that the origin of the production boards went back to the Soviet Union and the workers’ councils that in co-operation with the soldiers’ councils had taken over management after the socialist revolution. The entire proposal was only a preparation for a much more comprehensive transformation of the Swedish working life and society by which the workers would really get a definite decision-making right over the companies. Moreover, the proposal was based on a number of logical inaccuracies. According to von Sydow, it was “given” that the economic and the actual management of a company must coincide. If the workers took over management, they would put their interests before the good of the company.The workers’ loyal interests p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 9 262 529 SOU1923:29, pp. 228-239.
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