c o n t i n u i t y a n d c o n t r ac t 9 n c r e a s i n g ly,Western societies and legal thinking are characterised by the significance of fundamental human rights. A movement towards greater individualisation runs parallel to this development. These tendencies challenge two distinctive features of current Swedish labour law. Firstly, the legal rules in question, for example, concerning employment protection, are comprehensible only in the light of a notion of the con-tract of employment being essentially an authoritarian relation-ship of inequality. Secondly, Swedish labour law and the indus-trial relations model are to a large extent based on colllectivism and social partnership. Accordingly, the Labour Court has at-tached the employee’s far-reaching duty of obedience directly to the collective agreement and its area of application. Is this legal state of things compatible with the view that an employee is not only a person who sells labour to an employer, but who also has a full range of fundamental rights regardless of the connection he or she has to an organisation for promoting his/her interests? In seeking to answer this question, my point of departure is that an understanding of current labour law is facilitated by studying different assumptions that might underlie the legal rules. Accordingly, I have tried to analyse the emergence of the legal doctrine about the employee’s subordination and its incorporation in Swedish law during the first three decades of the 20th century as well as its interplay with a collectivist system. I Preface
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