On the other hand, several legal documents were aimed primarily at confirming the employer’s supremacy. In 1905 SAF had claimed that the relationship of employment had to be legally adapted to the “modern”, collective shapes in which it appeared. In 1907 Gustav Olin and Assar Åkerman presented a memorandum to the government, indicating that the best guarantee for establishing peace on the labour market was to rely on already established ways of living and to allow the collective agreements to develop “naturally”.This switch from individualism to collectivism was reflected in the national agreement for metal industry in1905 and in the “December compromise” in1906 between the Swedish Employers’ Organisation (SAF) and the Swedish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO).The agreement meant that the employers recognised the workers’ right to associate at the same time as the trade unions accepted the employer’s right “to freely engage and dismiss workers, to direct and distribute work and to use workers from any union what so ever or standing outside a union”, which was a formulation transferred from section 23 of SAF’s charter. No other part of the collective agreements was to be so debated as this section, which from1961 was known as “section32”(§32). Likewise from the unpublished texts of a labour law committee that was appointed in1907, as well as from statements of SAF on the eve of the general strike in 1909, it clearly emerges that the worker’s duty of obedience was a very vexed issue. In 1908 disagreements about the employer’s right to direct the work led to sabotage against the ship “Amalthea” which killed one strikebreaker and severely injured seven other. The memorandum by Olin and Åkerman of 1907 marked an important step not only from individualism towards collectivism, but also from public law towards private law.Two well-known bills of 1910 and 1911 respectively demonstrated that the state had formally accepted the established trade union movement. The bills were aimed at striking a balance between maintaining a traditional, patriarchal relationship and specifying the worker’s c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 297
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