was aimed at increasing their devotion to the enterprise, which would benefit the interests of the employer.An insistence on industrial democracy, similar to the one thatWigforss had demanded on, was incorporated in the Social Democrats’ party manifesto in 1924, but it received only marginal support from the party when the issue was brought up in parliament. SAF’s president, Hjalmar von Sydow, answered the demands for industrial democracy with the same kind of arguments that he had used since 1909, namely, that it was self-evident that the owner of the enterprise also must direct its operations. No other sector of society was less apt for democracy than working life, since the employer’s supremacy was a result of “the nature of things” and an introduction of industrial democracy would hurt its competitiveness and continuance. Industrial democracy would result in capital fleeing abroad, which in the last resort should hit the workers themselves.Thus, rather than using legislation to change the established positions, the state must let the economic conditions followthe economic laws that spontaneously emerged on the labour market. By the middle of the 1920s, it was evident that the state of things on the labour market had changed rapidly. Still it was a controversial question how to legally regulate the new situation. In 1926, the master-servant statute of 1833 was abolished with all its patriarchal and ethical rules which had their ideological and legislative origin in the medieval provincial codes. Illustrating the ambivalence of the times, three Supreme Court justices of the Council of Legislation (“Lagrådet”), who had the task to scrutinise the legislation from constitutional and systematical points of view, opposed this abolition, stating that the even if the masterservant statute was ancient, its essential ideas were “still vital”. During the years 1926-1928, efforts were intensified to pass legislation that would force the parties to follow the terms of a c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 303 1926 - 28
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