that the individual labour relationship was not characterised by the freedom of contract.This was instead regulated by the collective agreement, which according to Ekeberg had the same legal dignity as legislation.When analysing the modern contracts of work, Ekeberg had problems in freeing himself from the old tradition in the sense that he called the parties sometimes employer and employee, sometimes master and servant. As a discordant note in the legal scientific chorus HugoWikander (1913) appeared. It is true that he, like Undén picked many of his influences from the German professors’ references to custom. But he interpreted reality differently than his colleagues by not joining the predominant doctrine of subordination. It could not be considered, Wikander wrote, that the service contract (tjänsteavtalet) in contrast to the contract of specified work (arbetsbetinget) was characterised by the working party’s subordination to the paying party or obligation to act primarily in the interest of the employer. In the case of a contract on specified work, the worker’s independence could be considerably limited. Above all, the ordinary labour contracts included lots of cases in which the worker himself decided over his work, which made it a fiction to refer to the employer’s right of direction. By drawing analogies to physicians and artists,Wikander treated the worker more as an independent professional craftsman than as an open resource which was placed under the free disposition of an employer. Moreover, his analysis lacked the kind of references to “the general opinion of justice” and “the nature of things” that characterised the texts of, among many others, Nordling, Chydenius, Björling and Undén. ButWikander’s point of view was not representative of Swedish legal writing during the formative period of labour law.The majority of legal writers reached another conclusion, namely, that the modern free contract of employment presupposed certain “natural” terms. The most important of these pre-contractual natural terms was the worker’s far-reaching duty of obedience. p a r t i v, c h a p t e r 1 0 312
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