president of the labour court.The committee analysed the phenomenon of collective agreements as one general legal concept, as “the collective agreement”, under the rubric of which the cases from real labour life should be subsumed and the legal consequences of the concept would eventually emerge. The experts alluded to legal sources more resembling metaphysics than anything. Remarkably often they founded their conclusions on the reasoning that something was “evident” (Sw. “tydligt”),“one would probably in general consider” (“torde man i allmänhet kunna anse”) or “the collective agreement’s natural frame” (“kollektivavtalets naturliga ram”). Thus “one would probably not doubt” that the general opinion held that collective agreements should have a binding force on the contracting organisations as well as on their individual members. From the collective agreement’s “nature” followed that, in general, industrial actions could not be permitted. Even if it would be desirable, and in harmony with the collective agreement’s “nature”, to extend its peace obligation to disputes concerning non-regulated issues, this was, according to the three experts, impossible at the present time. Industrial actions in so called legal disputes ought to be prohibited.Thus actions in order to change the collective agreement were rejected due to the agreement’s “nature” and “one would probably in general consider” them to be unlawful if they concerned the interpretation of the agreement’s real meaning. The prohibition of legal disputes drew the attention to what subjects of contention that really were regulated in the collective agreement.Was the parties’ obligation to observe industrial peace limited only to matters that had been explicitly treated in the text or could it also embrace issues not been mentioned there? The experts of 1927 followed the latter line. It was “evident” they wrote, that an issue could be regulated by the agreement, even if it was not mentioned. In concrete cases one had p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 1 0 306
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