After the First World War the workers’ movement not only managed to achieve enormous social-political improvements. Other major accomplishments were co-determination in companies and the establishment of Arbeiterkammern (Chambers of Labor), which meant an internationally almost unique institutionalization. One project illuminates this process, as well as its history and consequences from a “bottom-up” perspective.
Instead of publishing an institutional-historical anniversary edition, the IHSF has decided to compile a history of the Austrian welfare state. Its development is on the one hand closely connected to the workers’ movement, on the other hand it can only be understood in a broader social, political, and economic context.
The starting point are not dry legal texts and unwieldy collective agreements, but the real-life situation of the affected people in their respective epochs. The narrative arc reaches from the middle of the 19th century to the present. The publication is planned for mid-2021.