c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 333 The issue about how to treat the new, “free” contracts outside the master-servant relationship was even more intricate. How much space should be given the parties themselves to determine the terms of the contract?What components of the master-servant rules should be applied to the free contracts, and what was the theoretical foundation for such a transfer? Winroth’s book in 1878 marked a new view by claiming that labour contracts must be based on the parties’ free will, and purified from public law components. In particular he criticised the century-old attachment between the vagrancy rules and the statutes on master and servant. He also discussed a method for making legal rules that satisfied the demands of a changing working life. Among other things he suggested the master-servant rules being extended from blue-collar workers who lived with their masters to white-collar workers with a household of their own. We have paid specific attention to his idea of also letting a selection of these rules be applied to the new,“free” labour contracts that emerged on the Swedish market without fitting into any established legal model.According toWinroth, the modern service contract should include those rules from the statutes on the master-servant relationship that had an “essential or natural quality, which was derived from the very character of the contract”.Winroth concluded that the worker’s subordination and open-ended duty of obedience was the most important of these “natural” terms. If neither legislation nor the contract provided guidance for interpreting an agreement, the decisive source should be such established customs that could be observed in patterns of living or in judicial decisions. However, during the last decades of the 19th century, neither legislation, nor case-law, nor customs, were possible to legally apply to the actual political problems.The guild regulation and poor people’s legal obligation to take annual work had been abolished at the same time as an increasing part of labour agreements fell outside the traditional “family”. Many contracts did not fulfil
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