At that time, when political democracy and universal suffrage had been introduced, and Social Democrats demanded “industrial democracy”, the Liberals considered the time ripe for legislation on mandatory arbitration in disputes about collective agreements.Accordingly, in1928the democratically elected parliament passed the controversial bills on a Collective Agreement Act and a Labour Court Act. No doubt, the most important aim was to limit the parties’ scope for industrial actions. The acts prohibited industrial actions in legal disputes, concerning issues that were regulated in the agreement.The preparatory works several times emphasised the collective agreement’s “nature” of being an instrument for keeping peace on the labour market. Furthermore they claimed that this obligation for industrial peace could apply to unwritten, hidden terms, if they “could be considered as falling within the contract’s natural framework”.Three experts wrote the text, among them Arthur Lindhagen, who soon was to become the labour court’s first president and thus apply the statutes he had prepared himself. In the parliamentary debate of 1928, many of those who promoted the legislation asserted that nature meant the same as the common terms of the collective agreements that were to be found in real life.The labour movement’s representatives in general now admitted the actual existence of these patterns, including the controversial section 23, but rejected them as reflecting unequal positions of power and feared that the labour court would transfer disputes of interests to legal disputes, which were covered by the act’s obligation for industrial peace. In the years that followed, the precedents established by the court were important and concluded that all section 23 prerogatives, which the legislature had rejected in1910-1911, must be considered as hidden components of each collective agreement, and thus normative general principles of law. Consequently the court fixed the worker’s duty of obedience to tasks that had a natural connection to the employer’s enterprise and laid down p a r t v, c h a p t e r 11 338
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