collective agreement. Employers and the right-wing groups of the parliament expressed a positive approach to legislation on mandatory arbitration in “legal disputes”, and to a labour court with considerable components of professional jurists. A community founded on the rule of law could not let legal disputes be settled by the strongest party’s power and not by a court.Thus, the agreements could function not only as standard setters for individual contracts, but furthermore as instruments for keeping peace on the labour market. At this stage in the formative period,more parties than the Conservatives backed the employers’ demands for state intervention. From the 1920s the Liberals changed their position. Before the FirstWorldWar one of their main contributions was to support the labour movement’s rejection of legislation on the contract of employment.Their resistance to the bills of 1910 and1911 seems primarily to have been based on the notion that it was not yet time for a kind of legislation, which in itself might be suitable. After the introduction of parliamentarism and political democracy around1920, the liberal groups not only supported but also even took the initiative to promotion legislation about regulating collective agreements and mandatory arbitration in legal disputes.The Liberals referred to the fact that the workers’ increased civil rights also meant increased civil obligations. After all, the step might not have been that long considering that the Liberals as early as 1905 had principally supported the idea of labour legislation. Besides, the Social Democrats’ distrust of professional lawyers was never shared by the Liberal MPs, many of whom themselves belonged to the profession in question. Statements in the preparatory works and in parliament by Conservatives,Arvid Lindman and Jakob Pettersson as well as the Liberal C G Ekman testify to a strong intention to limit the scope of self-regulation that the big organisations on the labour market had conquered. Debating in 1926 with Social Democratic MPs, the Agrarian Party’s Karl Gustaf Westman admitted the p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 1 0 304
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=