of things and in the national agreement furthermore expressly confirmed”. In view of the subversive effect such an insubordination was aimed to have on discipline at the workplace, a worker’s refusal to obey management’s order concerning the organisation of work must in principle be considered as a serious offence.The court was unanimous. For some decades, the issue about the section 23 prerogatives was defused in favour of an image of shared common interests between different parts of the society and the revival of the notion of consensus as the basis for Swedish labour life.The “spirit of Saltsjöbaden” signified the parties’ capacity and ambition on their own to overcome deep-running conflicts of interest.The rules concerning the extent of the employer’s power to change working conditions could be removed both by explicit rules in collective agreements and individual contracts of employment. In addition, the apportionment of roles in the regulations between the labour market parties, the legislature and the judiciary was deemed to be optimal. This state of things changed in the latter half of the 1960s when consensus gave place to confrontation. In a clear connection with technical and economic changes as well as with left-wing movements abroad, increasing unruliness emerged on the Swedish labour market. In this shift of attitude, the labour court’s lawmaking and strict fidelity to its own decisions were criticised for being out of date. It was debatable whether the established system of collective negotiations was any longer viable.Within a few years during the 1970s, legislature radically changed to interventionism and started a legislative explosion. In1974 safeguards against dismissal without “objective grounds” were regulated in the Protection of Employment Act.The legislation bore a striking resemblance to the statement of the law committee of 1686 that a master could not dismiss a servant without having a “reasonable ground”. A lot of other issues, which so far had been subjects to collective negotiations, were regulated by legislation, for p a r t v, c h a p t e r 1 2 348
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