the formal requirements of the Statute on Servants and Hired Labourers of 1833 as well as the Freedom of Trade Act of 1864.As the situation was to be a century later, there were inevitable indications of a rapidly changing working life. Likewise, the situation was extremely unclear to grasp, which was reflected inWinroth’s conclusions. Social problems reached an acute stage around the turn of the century, 1900. In part IV we noticed how the existing legal rules were out of step with real life. Simultaneously Swedish working life entered its collectivist period.After the workers’ organisations had joined together in1899 to form LO (Swedish Confederation of Trade Unions), which started to co-operate with the Social Democratic Party, and the employers had founded, SAF (the Swedish Employer’s Organisation, since 2001 Confederation of Swedish Enterprise) in1902, collective agreements tended to be a common feature of Swedish labour market.Another side of the coin was that the big organisations resorted to offensive actions, strikes and lockouts. Many politicians, debaters and lawyers considered the collective actions on the labour market to seriously threaten the enterprises’ competitiveness and society’s stability. The 19th century social issue grew into the 20th century “worker’s issue”, a switch of cultural positions, which had at least three, overlapping, dimensions.The social aspect concerned social security and was partly regulated by public law legislation from the first decades of the 20th century, while the political issues reached a decisive period in1917-1921when a parliamentary system, universal suffrage and representative democracy were established. The economic dimension, thirdly, dealt with how to balance the two opposing demands of liberty of action.The new society’s entrepreneurs demanded a flexible and mobile workforce which could be hired for shorter periods than the master-servant rules p a r t v, c h a p t e r 11 334 11. 4 industrial i zat ion and collect ivi sm
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