This was what happened when Nehrman treated the contemporary labour law. More precisely, the disseminated rules about the master-servant relationship were analysed under the heading of locatio conductio operarum, which was established in the ius commune of his time, and can be traced back directly to Roman Law andCorpus Iuris Civilis.Nehrman’s analysis of 1729meant a decisive contribution which was aimed at linking the labour law regulation closer to the scientific private law thinking that was to expand during the 19th and20th centuries.Maybe, it can also be regarded as a step towards recognising the worker as an independent party to a contract, when the Code of 1734 placed the rules in concern in the Book of Commerce. So, the master-servant relationship was not treated as a branch of family law, but of contract law.108 In this respect, the great significance for Swedish labour law history, which has been attached to the late 19th century in general and Alfred Ossian Winroth in particular, may appear to be exaggerated. At the same time, we can not disregard that Nehrman’s and the code’s conception of the master-servant relation were coloured by exactly the same notions of “ethical components”; obedience, loyalty and care, which were prescribed by the rules concerning parents and children. In reality the worker’s freedom of contract boiled down to a freedom to chose what master one should submit to or what collective body to represent one’s own best interests. Apparently, Nehrman did not see any contradiction between the contractual ideas of Roman law and patriarchal ideologies about status. Thus, the tension between contract models influenced by “Romanistic” contract law and patriarchal (“Germanistic”) master-servant law, which Alain Supiot has indicated concerning European legal history in general, is visible as well in Swedish legal history.The Swedish model, however, deviated p a r t 1 i , c h a p t e r 2 58 108 Axel Adlercreutz claims that even during periods when the official regulation reached its peak, and though the options for the working party to maintain his or her viewpoints and demands were very limited, the contract element in the work relation was never totally non-existent. Adlercreutz, A1954, p. 140.
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