in the master-servant statute of 1833 did not supply any relevant rules for a changed labour market. For the present situation, guidelines had to picked by using analogies from other areas and by searching for the “nature of things”, which meant the general, predominant Swedish opinion of justice.With word-for-word quotations from the master-servant statute, Berndt Hasselrot stated (1920, 1926) that the worker was subordinate to the employer, the duty of obedience was determined partly by the individual contract, partly by what the employer needed or by the prevailing practice of the business. Hasselrot was considerably less inclined to recognise that the employer had a corresponding obligation to take care of his workers. One of the first writers who realised the political and legal importance of the collective agreements was Östen Undén (1910, 1912, 1916). He paid attention to the workers’ subordinate position of power and need for legal protection. Undén, who was a predominant, leading Social Democrat, recommended the establishment of a labour court, emphasised the collective agreements’ function as instruments of an industrial peace obligation, and claimed that it was not appropriate for labour law to make a distinction between “disputes of interests” and “legal disputes”. When it came to the worker’s duty of obedience, Undén followed the GermanHugo Sinzheimer closely and maintained that the employer had the right, unilaterally and at any time, to change the terms of the work.These prerogatives went with the “actual nature of the industrial labour contract” and could thus be characterised as “naturale contractus according the current optional customary law”. The employer’s duty to guarantee safety at the workplace, however, Undén did not base on a natural ground, but on public law legislation. Birger Ekeberg (1925) admitted that the general principles of Swedish working life originated from the freedom of contract and an individualistic foundation of Roman law. Nevertheless he reached the same opinion as most of his colleagues, namely, c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 311
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