market, the principles of the Statute on Servants and Hired Labourers (Sw. Legohjonsstadgan) still coloured the contractual relationship.177 The statute in question had been introduced in1833, and would remain in force until 1926.178 As the last in a series of acts starting from1664, the Statute of 1833 was rich in general principles on society and mankind, which can easily be traced back to medieval and scholastic philosophy. It was considered to have replaced the summary rules in the Book of Commerce of the Swedish Code of 1734.179 All the same it upheld a century-old connection between, on the one hand, administrative law rules on compulsory service and the duty of annual employment for every ablebodied person who did not own a fixed amount of money and, on the other hand, rules regulating the terms of labour relationships. Since the Middle Ages, every person without means was formally obliged “to present a lawful occupation”, at the risk of being treated as a vagrant and placed in some kind of forced servitude. As has already been mentioned, the statute’s point of departure was an ambition to promote long-lived, personal, and diffuse relationships, based on the servant’s duty of subordination and the master’s duty of care.The general principle was the same as it had been for centuries, namely that the worker was considered to be a general contribution to his counterpart’s workforce, and thus was committed to a far-reaching duty to perform all the working tasks that he or she was ordered to fulfil. But furthermore, the worker was obliged to exhibit virtues such as temper-ance, morality and piety, which after all had but an indirect con-nection with the very performance of work. If a servant made complaints about the food, he or she could be warned, chastised and eventually dismissed. p a r t 1 i i , c h a p t e r 3 86 177 SFS 1864:41, sections 15, 17, 22; Göransson 1988, p. 87. 178 SFS 1833:43. 179 The connection between the Statutes on Hired Servants and the Code of 1734 are discussed above in part II. See alsoWinroth 1878, pp 38-39 and Nial 1934, p. 310.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=