c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 275 not been regulated by the agreement. He added that in such cases the Swedish Labour Court could obtain good guidance from “the nature of things and existing practice within the profession”.556 Pettersson admitted that the boundary between legal disputes and disputes of interest was very unclear (“so all legal disputes are interest disputes”).557 He wanted to clarify his line of reasoning in the bill by the statement that legal disputes referred to questions that could be considered as regulated by the agreement.558For example, a dispute about how wages should be determined after a change in technical production “was to be considered” as a legal dispute, i. e. exempted from the right to strike. But a legal dispute must also be understood as a dispute wherein one of the parties claimed in relation to the other party “a right that he had already acquired or in any case feels he has acquired by the parties’ entering into an agreement”.559 If for example, during contractual negotiations, one of the parties had put forward the demand that a certain right must be ascribed to him and the other party opposed that demand, the silence of the agreement on this point must be considered to mean that by the terms of the agreement it was decided that the right in question did not exist. The natural law line of reasoning was carried even further. In certain cases, Pettersson wrote in the bill, a demand did not even have to be made for the contract to be able to be considered as including a negative decision, namely, if it were a question of “depriving or ascribing respectively one of the parties a right that he has or does not have respectively according to the nature of things, if an expressed regulation in the opposite direction is not stated in the agreement”.560 556 Prop. 1928:39, pp. 88-90. 557 AK1928:39, p. 88. 558 Prop. 1928:39, pp. 45-50. 559 Prop. 1928:39, pp. 92-93. 560 Prop. 1928:39, pp. 95.The bill exemplified this by the protection of the employee’s right of free association which, as has been mentioned, was also a part of the controversial section 23 after the “December compromise” in 1906.
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