Workplace Justice

The project titled Workers’ Agency and Social Justice in the Age of Authoritarianism: Austria and Czechoslovakia, 1938–1989 is a research project funded by the European Commission.

It 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, the research aims at analysis of how the notion of social justice was imagined in the workplace, how it circulated among and was communicated by workers during National Socialism 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 National Socialism to Cold War, and (3) bridge the conventional distinction between socialist Eastern and democratic Western Europe by studying institutionalized mechanisms of workplace justice with respect to equality, rights, and labour safety.

The project is a part of the HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01, listed under the acronym WORK-AGE-JUST, project No. 101063597.

Radka Šustrová, the principal investigator of this project, studied history and political science in Prague and Berlin. She completed her PhD in Prague in 2018. In her research, she focuses on the history of labour, nationalism, social justice, gender and the history of the welfare state in 20th-century central Europe.

Radka started as a historian of the Second World War, exploring occupied societies and the welfare state development. Since 2016, she substantially published also on post-war history.

She was previously awarded the British Academy Newton International Fellowship and served as a supervisor in history at the University of Cambridge and a lecturer in social history at Charles University in Prague. Her dissertation, titled Nations Apart. Czech Nationalism and Authoritarian Welfare under Nazi Rule was published by Oxford University Press in the British Academy monograph Series in 2024. Her further publications include three books, several edited volumes, and articles.

Radka is an associated researcher of the Research Centre for the Study of Transformations, based at the University of Vienna. More: https://www.recet.at/our-team/detail/radka-sustrova

She previously held research positions at the Collegium Carolinum, Czech Academy of Sciences and Lidice Memorial in Prague.

In February 2024, Cambridge University Press published a collective volume titled Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Martin Conway and Camilo Ehrlichman. Radka contributed to this book with a chapter on ‘Social justice in Authoritarian Central Europe: Czechoslovakia under Nazism and Communism’. This chapter seeks to illustrate from the bottom up the role that social justice played in establishing and maintaining authoritarian rule in Czechoslovakia under National Socialism and state socialism. The author investigates how notions of social justice were included in the social practice of both regimes and how the working population responded to these policies.

In mid-February 2024, Nations Apart. Czech Nationalism and Authoritarian Welfare under Nazi Rule, authored by Radka Šustrová, has been published by Oxford University Press (for British Academy). This book is not an outcome of the MSCA Action research but marked substantially Radka’s starting point when thinking about the investigation of workplace justice. Nations Apart underlines the non-violent dimension of authoritarian rules in Europe by showing strategies of the occupational regime and local participation in building a new order.

The book is available as open access and free to download here

Workshop: The State-Owned Enterprise as Site of Solidarity and Conflict

13 – 14 February 2025, Vienna (Austria)

State-owned enterprises were a cornerstone of socialist economies, but also contributed greatly to the economies of the decolonized world and the capitalist West in the postwar era. This workshop seeks to examine state-owned enterprises as nexuses of solidarity and conflict from 1945 to the present, reorienting our understanding of Cold War economies and labour regimes away from a picture of division. We welcome contributions from across a variety of humanities and social sciences such as history, sociology or anthropology mapping how cases of solidarity or conflict within state-owned enterprises related to national political, economic, and/or social policies.

Within the socialist world, a language of both friendly and “unfriendly” competition shaped official accounts of work at state-owned enterprises (with factory newspapers urging workers to vie, on the one hand, with neighbouring plants to meet plan quotas the fastest and, on the other hand, to “catch up with and overtake” the West). As the postwar welfare state developed and calls for social justice became louder in West European societies, infrastructures and tools for conflict resolution and the promotion of solidarities were implemented there—how specifically, we ask, in state-owned enterprises where regulations may have been easier to put into practice than in private businesses?

With state-owned enterprises sometimes operating within economies of shortage, papers might analyse how resources were fought over within these organizations and, more generally, whether shortages led to conflict—were there in fact ways in which they brokered solidarity as well? Frequently embedded within supply chains that spanned states (and sometimes even blocs), how did the position of state-owned enterprises within such chains foster identification and/or frustration with other interlinked actors? Can we identify rituals and strategies that workers developed that helped to maintain solidarity or eliminate conflict?

If state-owned enterprises are sometimes depicted as sites of “meaningless” work (whose workers “pretended to work” while their employers “pretended to pay them”), then this workshop—through an examination of solidarities and conflicts within such enterprises, East, West, and South—enriches business and labour histories with a picture of these entities as important sites of meaning-making. Examining which international, national, and local solidarities and rivalries were fostered within state-owned enterprises, papers will shed new light on how state-owned enterprises themselves become sites of solidarity and, on the other hand, the cause of conflict in the municipalities and states in which they were based. Such analyses will reveal changing forms of non-violent conflicts, socialist internationalism, workers’ solidarity (and indeed, while rare, solidarity between workers and managers) and, ultimately, workplace justice.

Dr. Alessandro Iandolo (University College London) will deliver the workshop‘s keynote lecture. Confirmed participants also include Profs. Philipp Ther (University of Vienna) and Tao Chen (Tongji University).

To apply for the workshop, please send an abstract of 300 words and a short bio to both rosamund.johnston(at)univie.ac.at and radka.kopecek.sustrova(at)univie.ac.at. The application deadline is November 15, 2024.