Workers’ Agency and Social Justice in the Age of Authoritarianism: Austria and Czechoslovakia, 1938–1989

The project entitled “Workers’ Agency and Social Justice in the Age of Authoritarianism: Austria and Czechoslovakia, 1938–1989” develops a bottom-up perspective on workers’ engagement and promotion of social justice The project entitled “Workers’ Agency and Social Justice in the Age of Authoritarianism: Austria and Czechoslovakia, 1938–1989” develops a bottom-up perspective on workers’ engagement and promotion of social justice in the labour environment in Central Europe.

Using and historically exploring the concepts of labour, social justice, and the welfare state, I will analyse how the notion of social justice was imagined in the workplace, how it circulated among and was communicated by workers during Nazism and Cold War and how the central European countries, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia, treated working conditions and labour relationships in the ‘age of extremes.’ The project aims to (1) explore employees’ understanding of social justice, (2) search for continuities and ruptures from Nazism to Cold War, and (3) bridge the conventional distinction between socialist Eastern and democratic Western Europe by studying institutionalized mechanisms of social justice in the work environment with respect to equality, rights, and labour safety.

This is a topic full of relevance for our own times.

Labour rights have come to the fore of political debate, in response to growing social inequality, and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.