Pettersson’s reasonings showed a resemblance with those of Johannes Hellner in 1910, G H von Koch in 1920 and the Central Association for Social Work in 1927.The demand for mandatory arbitration in disputes about collective agreements as well as teleological ideas about “the nature of things” could very well be part of a social-liberal programme. The questions about what importance custom should have as a source of law and where the boundary line should be drawn between interest disputes and legal disputes ran throughout the discussion.The boundary was of central importance for how far the obligation of industrial peace could extend for the actors on the Swedish labour market if there was legislation. Pettersson argued that the proposed act constituted “a summary of the rules that had developed in the present field”.554 It was now quite simply a question of giving the support of society and legislation to the actual legal state of affairs that had already arisen in the field and that was in need of such a sanction.555 In the 1928 bill, Pettersson referred back, almost word-forword, to the ideas that had been expressed by Huss, Elmquist and Lindhagen the year before, namely, that it immediately followed from the “nature” of the collective agreement that the parties were not allowed during the period of the agreement to resort to industrial actions in order to bring about a change in the agreement. In this context, the minister took up the question of when a collective agreement could be considered as having regulated the contractual conditions by hidden terms. Like the investigation of 1927, he argued that this depended on an interpretation of the collective agreement and what issues could be considered as falling within the “natural framework”of the agreement. He even repeated that it was obvious that the circumstance that a certain question was not dealt with in the agreement by itself did not constitute complete evidence that it had p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 9 274 554 Prop. 1928:39, pp. 45-52. 555 AK1928:13, p. 9.
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