Workplace Justice

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

Funded by the European Union, this research project takes a fresh, bottom-up approach to understanding how workers in central Europe shaped and fought for social justice in the workplace during some of the most turbulent decades of the 20th century. By critically engaging with the concepts of labour, social justice, and the welfare state, the project investigates how workers imagined and communicated the idea of justice at work under National Socialism and throughout the Cold War. It examines how Austria and Czechoslovakia navigated labour relations and working conditions in what historian Eric Hobsbawm called the “age of extremes.”

Key objectives include:

– Unpacking how workers themselves understood and articulated social justice.

– Tracing continuities and ruptures in workplace justice from the Nazi regime to the Cold War era.

– Challenging the conventional divide between socialist Eastern and democratic Western Europe by analyzing the institutional mechanisms that shaped workplace equality, rights, and safety.

This project is part of 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 at Charles University, Prague, in 2018. Her research focuses on the history of labour, nationalism, social justice, gender, and the welfare state in 20th-century Central Europe.

Radka initially began her career as a historian of the Second World War, studying occupied societies and the development of the welfare state. Since 2016, she has also significantly contributed to the field of post-war history.

In 2019, she was awarded the British Academy Newton International Fellowship, and from 2020 to 2022, she served as a supervisor in history at the University of Cambridge and as a lecturer in social history at Charles University. Her dissertation, Nations Apart: Czech Nationalism and Authoritarian Welfare under Nazi Rule, was published by Oxford University Press in the British Academy Monograph Series in 2024. She is the author of three books, several edited volumes, and numerous articles.

Radka is currently an associated researcher at the Research Centre for the Study of Transformations at the University of Vienna. She has also held research positions at the Collegium Carolinum, the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the Lidice Memorial in Prague.

A full list of her publications is available here.

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 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

Reviewed in History: Reviews of New Books

The events organized within the WORK-AGE-JUST serve as platforms for disseminating research findings and fostering discussions among scholars, researchers, and practitioners engaged in related fields. Ranging from academic conferences to semi-academic workshops and roundtable discussions, these events aim to bridge disciplinary perspectives, encourage knowledge exchange, and stimulate critical engagement with the project’s core themes.

Through workshops, public discussions, and roundtables, the project actively promotes an inclusive and participatory research culture. By facilitating conversations across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, it aims to create lasting collaborations and encourage the development of new research agendas in the field.

In addition to her academic publications, Radka is deeply committed to popularising research on labour, social and economic rights, gender and social justice, helping to make these critical issues accessible to a broader audience.

Follow this section to explore these themes further and understand their relevance to the broader history of the 20th century.