c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 285 about the reliability of judges.The decisions of the labour court in reality would be laid in the hands of one person, namely, the chairman, since he was the one who had the deciding vote. Engberg asked prophetically what it was that prevented a situation from arising from the very first application of the act where one had to do with a number of unreasonable judgements that would set precedents that could not be changed, but instead laid the foundation for prevailing legal praxis.586 The strong opposition of the Social Democratic Party has been explained as being part of political tactics, conditioned by the fact that elections to the Swedish parliament were to be held in the autumn of 1928, and that it would have been “political suicide” to support a bill that had been introduced by a competing party’s government.587 If that is the case, then the Social Democrats undoubtedly carried out their tactics with impressive intensity. However, the Social Democrats’ need to demarcate territory to the left can be seen in the different speeches made by representatives of the Swedish Communist Party, who not only shouted abuse at the bourgeoisie but also called the Social Democrats the watchdogs of the capitalist society. But several of the points they made were the same as those of the Social Democrats, not least when it came to the problematic drawing of boundaries between legal and interest disputes, as well as the Central Arbitration Board’s alleged employer friendly interpretation of disputes dealing with the calculation of wages when work assignments had been changed.The Communists also agreed that the act would give support of the notorious section 23 and leave the field open for the arbitrariness of the employers. Legislation would result in “legal hair-splitting” where purely disputes of interest would be successfully declared legal disputes by the “buyers of labour” (Sw. arbetsköparna).The class affiliation and education of 586 AK1928:38, pp. 75-80 (Engberg). See also AK1928:38, pp. 133-134 (Englund). 587 Westerståhl 1945, pp. 372-376; Göransson 1988, pp. 226-227; Sigeman 1988-89.
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