duty of obedience.They also made possible a dialogue between the parties about the terms of work.Thus, the employer was entrusted to make plant regulations regardless of what the parties might have agreed upon.At the same time, the regulations would be null and void if the workers had not been able to give their opinion on the matter. What’s more, the preparatory works paid attention to the legal foundation of the rules. The alleged ambition to adapt labour law to existing patterns was a predominant, but controversial, feature of the bills in 1910 and 1911.The bill of 1910 is of special interest when studying the debate on the content and legal foundation of the employment relationship. It prescribed that the employer’s “section 23 prerogatives” should form a mandatory and pre-contractual term, not only in every individual contract of employment, but also in every collective agreement. The Conservatives, among others Arvid Lindman and Albert Petersson, described the bill as a maximum effort to adjust positive rules to current manners and customs, and to consider what solutions that had proved to be the most appropriate in practice. They held that the bills did not entrust the employer with any right he did not already have according to general principles of law. His section23 prerogatives were now included in so many collective agreements that they must be considered as normative, and it would cause a misunderstanding if the legislature deviated from this term. Furthermore, it followed from the nature of things that the employer had the right of direction, since he was responsible for the enterprise’s risks and it would be unthinkable that he should be obliged to keep a worker with whom he thought it was impossible to co-operate. Consequently, in addition to the tasks for which the worker had been engaged, he or she also had to perform every other duty according to what followed from customs. Alongside these frequent references to custom as the most important legal source, the government showed strong ambitions p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 1 0 298
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