importance of the legislation in question possessing legitimacy among the groups concerned. However,Westman said, this did not mean that the organisations on the labour market must be given the power to decide about the matters in question independent of the public institutions. It is obvious that the leadership of the labour movement’s two branches was split on how to handle the new political situation in general and the issue of legislation concerning collective agreements in particular. In this respect, the picture painted by Westerståhl (1945) and Göransson (1988) no doubt gets support from this study. The trade unions and the Social Democrats in general showed a great distrust of mandatory arbitration in labour disputes.The parties concerned should instead solve these controversies themselves, which meant collective agreements between the big organisations on the labour market. Many members of the unions could refer to deterring legal historical examples, such as the Statute on Hired Servants of 1833, the “Åkarp Act” of 1899 and the criminal sanctions in the bills of 1901 and 1910. However, at an early stage, several Social Democrats supported mandatory arbitration in legal disputes. It is true that in 1910 Hjalmar Branting and Herman Lindqvist categorically declared that professional lawyers, to say the least, had that unsympathetic view of the workers’ ambitions, which according to the gained experiences in too many cases characterised the spokesmen of higher legal education.Yet, already in the following year Lindqvist hinted at a more positive attitude, which was expressed by himself in the proposal of the National Board of Health andWelfare in1916, by Östen Undén in1920 as well as by Gustav Möller and Sigfrid Hansson in parliament. In 1927 legislative developments reached a decisive point.The government had appointed a committee to elaborate a draft on labour law legislation.Among the committee’s three experts was Arthur Lindhagen, who two years later was to become the first c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 305
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