As a very clear example, the worker’s duty of obedience was remarkably often legitimated by reference to the claim that the employer had “natural rights”, which had been confirmed in section23 of SAF’s charter and the “December compromise” between LO and SAF in1906.The terms “nature” or “the nature of things” (Sw. “sakens natur”), however, were used in a confusing manner, sometimes apparently in a descriptive, empirical sense, sometimes as a prescriptive, normative concept.The first meaning referred to some sort of sociological conclusion about customs and established patterns of living, while the second one was founded on legal-political desires of what must be considered as most fair or reasonable and thus ought to be the established pattern. The labour movement’s representatives often met these references to “natural rights” with either the argument that the alleged custom was not firmly established or that it was not generally accepted, let alone worth confirming by law. Right up to1928 this apparently confusing mixture of notions on contract and status influenced the intensive debate about the worker’s duty of obedience and the employer’s right to freely direct and distribute work. In short, the discussion can be described as a struggle between, on the one hand, the limitations found in the guild-tradition in the Act on Freedom of Trade from1864 and, on the other hand, the open-ended duty of obedience in the Master-Servant Act of 1833. On the one hand, a number of legislative drafts and proposals between1901-1911 reflected the state’s ambitions to limit, and at the same time recognise, the employer’s prerogative in question. They prescribed that the worker could not, without his own consent, be used for tasks that were “really incompatible with his position”, lay outside his “real contract” or the tasks “for which he had been engaged”. p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 1 0 296 The legislative efforts 1901 -1915
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