The IHSF houses the archive of the Bundesarbeitskammer and the Arbeiterkammer Wien (Austrian Federal Chamber of Labor and Vienna Chamber of Labor). In the context of the Chambers of Labor, the collection is focused on the self-administration and participation of the AK in legislation. The stock includes committee documents, estates, law and regulation assessments, positional papers, biographic collections, collections of regional chambers, as well as documents on the training of members of works councils. The material gives insights into the defining role of the Chambers of Labor after 1945 and the institutional interaction with federal governments, parties, unions, and social partners.
The IHSF union collection is the largest of its kind in Austria. Central to it is the archive of the Gewerkschaft der Privatangestellten (union of salaried private sector employees, GPA), encompassing the time after 1945. Furthermore, the collection includes documents of other trade unions, estates of union officials and activists, collections from works councils as well as comprehensive information on individual unionists including a stock of oral-history interviews.
The collection on Austrian contemporary history includes material on various aspects, such as a collection of leaflets from the revolution of 1848, documents on the history of the Austrian parties (including the NSDAP) until 1933, the Republikanischer Schutzbund, political Catholicism, the history of Austro-Fascism with special consideration of political repression, as well as the October Strike of 1950.
The newest addition to the archive, currently being assembled, is the social history collection. It devotes itself in particular to visual sources of everyday and work life as well es ego-documents of workers, such as letters, diaries, etc. Its goal is to archivally illustrate the lives and mentalities, as well as the political and social activities of working people in Austria. Part of the social history collection is a separate stock on “social movements”. It is mainly meant as an offer to citizens’ and civil society initiatives to preserve their collections for posterity.
The IHSF collections are always being expanded. Do you have material that might fit? Contact us at archiv@ihsf.at.