to interpret the collective agreement’s meaning by asking what issues could “be considered to fall within the contract’s natural framework”. This reference to customs and natural components was expanded in a bill that the Liberal government under C G Ekman introduced in 1928 and which aimed at prohibiting industrial actions in legal disputes.The prohibition was sanctioned by damages to an amount of 200 Swedish crowns, which was equivalent to a worker’s monthly salary. The minister of justice, Jakob Pettersson, emphasised that the proposed legislation summarised the rules that had emerged in the area in question. It now was time for the state to protect the actual legal order and make the parties obey already concluded agreements and not resort to industrial actions. Pettersson admitted that the boundary between different kinds of disputes was unclear (“all legal disputes are disputes of interest”). He tried to make things clearer by declaring that legal disputes meant issues which could“be considered” to have been regulated in the agreement. For example, a disagreement about what salary should be paid when the terms of work had changed was a legal dispute and thus should be protected by the industrial peace obligation. After having repeated almost literally what Lindhagen et. al. had written about “natural framework” etc., Pettersson extended the peace obligation’s scope.The minister stated that a legal dispute must also be understood as each dispute in which either party claimed a right which he already had acquired or at least considered that he had according to the contract. In some cases it was not even necessary that the issue had been brought up at all during the negotiations, namely, if it concerned a right which the party had or did not have “according the nature of things” (Sw. enligt sakens natur). The task of drawing these lines should be entrusted to the labour court, which also had to consider former professional customs. c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 307
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