Historicizing Social Justice: Labour, Rights, and Power in Post-War Czechoslovakia and Austria

• In Event: Labour and Rights in Post-War East Central Europe: Rewriting History from Below

Abstract

A commitment to social justice and the promise of social equality have been a permanent feature of both democratic and dictatorial regimes in 20th-century Europe. Although historians are familiar with new perspectives on social and labour history, the entire historical extent and processual character of social justice in the daily interactions of employees and employers remains largely unexplored. To illuminate a process of striving for social justice in the workplace, the final outcome of which was unknowable to the workers, this paper focuses on employees’ understanding of their evolving rights and entitlements in their interactions with authoritarian governance in Czechoslovakia. Based on the preliminary results of ongoing research, I intend to analyse how social justice in the workplace was negotiated ‘from below’ and beyond rare open protest through various institutions such as trade unions and social, labour, and social insurance courts. It is built on the hypothesis that the essence of workplace justice was a demand for compliance with the ideological promises made by the regime. I propose that existing negotiation mechanisms for defending justice in the workplace make workers cooperate and tolerate or support the regime.

Author

• Radka Sustrova, U of Vienna (Austria)