Arbetsrätt och konkurrensrätt: en normativ studie av motsättningen mellan marknadsrättsliga värden och sociala värden

The dissertation deals with the normative conflict between labour law and competition law. The legislation in each area gives the Courts guidance in solving a legal problem that has previously been classified as belonging to one or the other area. But the principles guiding the Courts when both competition law and labour law are applicable to a legal problem are vague and difficult to generalise. The aim of the study is to reveal legal principles designed to help the judge make a choice between labour law and competition law. The study describes the core content of the two legal areas and proceeds to investigate how each legal area adapts its core content to other social values. Thus, I study how competition law adapts its application to avoid unnecessary damage to socially motivated regulations and how labour law adapts its application to avoid unnecessary damage to the economically efficient operations of different markets. After an overriding normative analysis of the legal areas at stake, I have been able to identify two truly common principles designed to draw the line between competition law and labour law: 1. The principle of a competition law immunity for trade union activity, limited to the core subjects of collective bargaining like wages and working conditions, and thus not covering anti-competitive agreements concerning the production of goods and services. 2. The principle of the open cartel. No organisation is allowed to actively exclude individual workers or companies in order to prevent them from entering the market. Those legal principles are then applied to three practical cases of conflicts of law between competition law and labour law namely, the collective bargaining technique which underpins the Swedish stevedoring cartel, collective agreements on opening hours and collective agreements on co-operation between undertakings.