c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 337 majority in the parliament’s second chamber turned down the bills.The Social Democrats rejected legislation with the deterrent examples from the vagrancy acts and master-servant rules fresh in mind, while the Liberals did not accept a far-reaching right to sympathy actions and rejected legislation as long as universal suffrage was not established. When the increasing number of industrial actions by employer and employee organisations on the labour market were regarded as a serious threat to the social stability, the individual contract of employment gradually diminished as a model of legal thought. Focus moved to the collective agreements and their potential role for regulating labour relations and keeping peace on the labour market. Simultaneously, the notion of natural terms and its confusing relationship to customs was passed the same way. Östen Undén, among many other things private law professor and Social Democratic minister of justice, emphasised the collective agreements’ function as instruments of an obligation for industrial peace. He claimed that it was not appropriate for labour law to make a distinction between, on the one hand, disputes of interests that could be objects of industrial actions and on the other hand legal disputes, which should be protected by a peace obligation.When it came to the worker’s duty of obedience, Undén followed the German Hugo Sinzheimer closely and maintained that the employer had the right, unilaterally and at any time, to change the terms of the work.These prerogatives followed from the “actual nature of the industrial labour contract” and were “naturale contractus pursuant to existing optional customary law”. At the same time Undén did not consider the employer’s duty to guarantee safety at the workplace as founded upon a natural ground, but on public law legislation. In 1925 Birger Ekeberg, another private law professor and minister of justice, claimed that the individual contract of labour no longer was built on freedom of contract, but on the mandatory rules of collective agreements, which were on a par with legislation.
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