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A short history of Austria’s Chamber of Labour
The idea of creating a chamber of labour (AK) to represent the interests of working people in Austria goes back to the mid-19th century. Its initial aim was primarily to counter the chambers of commerce and trade founded by the business community in 1848. These had been established to officially represent entrepreneurs and concentrated on influencing political processes in favour of their clientele, as can be seen, for example, in the amendments to trade regulations or early social legislation (both in the 1880s). From 1868 onwards, the chambers of commerce even had their own Curia in the House of Deputies of the Imperial Council of the Habsburg Monarchy. The original idea of the workers’ chamber was thus to "mirror" the instrument of the chamber of commerce "from below" and to give the majority of the population, otherwise excluded from the decision process, a political voice through their employment status.
The Habsburg monarchy was not very open to the idea of democratic influence, let alone the organized affirmation of working class interests. Accordingly, the efforts to establish workers' chambers were not successful until 1918. The situation changed with the First World War and the enormous misery it caused not only for soldiers but also for civilians. Within a few years, this experience had completely undermined the legitimacy of the monarchy.
From 1917 on, social democrats and the trade unions began to actively prepare for a political transformation. Within the Austrian workers’ movement, there was a broad consensus that the new order should not be enforced by a dictatorship of the proletariat based on the Russian model, but that political reorganisation should be achieved by legal means and that the bourgeois order of property should be retained by now. Thus, the workers' movement prepared itself to take over government functions in a bourgeois democracy.
Unlike Britain’s Labour Party in 1924, which would pay dearly for its error, the majority of the leadership of both, Social Democracy and Unions in Austria were aware that they could at best only sometimes count on the existing administrative elites and knowledge apparatuses, which were dominated by conservative civil servants and university professors.
This was the starting point for a modified idea of a chamber of labour, which was taken up in 1917 again and increasingly propagated: The chamber of labour would now form the core of a counter-elite, a separate knowledge apparatus for the workers' movement, which would make it possible to take decisions regarding legal issues, but also chiefly to assess the impact of individual political measures, independently of the bourgeois-dominated universities and ministerial bureaucracy. In addition, it would breathe life into recently enforced economic co-determination measures by supporting and training the new works councils which had been established in all major companies against fierce resistance of many of its owners. From the point of view of the business community and anti-democratic groups in the First Republic, the chamber of labour was therefore part of a development that had to be overthrown by an authoritarian regime change perspectively.
Yet, the Christian Social coup d'état of 1933/34 was not followed by the dissolution of the chamber of labour, but by its reorganisation. It was degraded from the status of independent institution to that of one office of the Austrofascist single trade union. The crucial difference was that in the First Republic it had been based on the idea of antagonistic class interests, while the new regime rejected the idea of a fundamental divergence of interests between labour and capital. Since the chamber could not unduly pursue interest politics in such a corporatist setting, it devoted itself increasingly to activities related to care and culture. When the National Socialists took power in 1938 in Austria, the chamber of labour was dismantled and its assets were absorbed by the German Labour Front and other state agencies.
The re-establishment of the AK after 1945 already pointed to a lasting change in the political system: from 1947, it played a decisive role in bringing about the wage-price agreements that formed the starting point for the Austrian system of social partnership. Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky aptly characterized this as "class struggle at the green table", an attempt to resolve conflicting social interests through negotiation and compromise.
Until the 1980s, this finely balanced consensual democratic approach influenced political events in the country significantly. The AK’s leading role was reflected in the 1954 Chambers of Labour Act. Whereas the first such law, in 1920, had only referred to the "economic and social" representation of interests, the cultural representation of interests was now added as a third sphere. At the same time, however, this definition was clearly more palatable to conservatives than that of a class organization in the narrow sense (which the AK had been in the First Republic).
The background was clear: in 1945, the system of directional unions close to the party had been replaced by unified unions that were officially independent of any party. Conservative trade unionists were thus no longer external to a structure that although it was dominated by social democrats granted conservatives minority rights and took their concerns into consideration, but within it. From the 1960s, a recurring demand of the workers’ organisations of both right wing parties, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) was a greater decoupling of the AK as a "general" interest organisation from the trade union “class organisation”. The idea was that the AK should provide an independent range of services and advice, instead of merely working directly and indirectly for the Austrian Trade Union Confederation.
Amid the deep crisis into which the AK slid in the 1980s, primarily because of its own failures and mistakes, the majority Social Democratic fraction also searched intensively for new patterns of legitimacy. As it became clear from surveys that it did not necessarily enjoy the perceived acceptance among members, a new space opened up in which previously rejected ideas could be re-examined constructively.
The result was the legal protection anchored in the 1992 Chamber of Labour Act, today the field of activity with which the AK is certainly most strongly associated by the Austrian public. In a certain sense, it was an attempt to combine the corporatist idea of an independent representation of interests, that is, as independent as possible from the trade unions, with the reformist ideal of a think tank for the labour movement. It was not intended to replace the trade unions but to strengthen their position in the state, in the enforcement of law, and to free them as a combat organisation for the workers.
This experiment succeeded. Notwithstanding the sharp decline in the importance of the Austrian social partnership, the AK has managed to overcome its crisis of legitimacy and, as an institution, it now enjoys the highest trust and popularity ratings among the Austrian population, along with the federal president. Instead of replacing the trade unions, as these sometimes worried might happen, the AK has helped to increase the clout of the extra-parliamentary enforcement of interests and, for example, to promote pragmatic solutions that are in the interests of employees in debates about the future of the social system, the management of economic crises or the current pandemic.
Last but not least, the work of the AK has had a decisive impact on case law in Austria. A 2014 study, which compared the jurisdiction of domestic labour and social courts with that of 1990 (i.e., with the phase before the AK offered advice and legal protection), showed an enormous increase of workers as the main party in legal proceedings: before the 1992 reform, it was mainly white-collar workers who took legal action, while in 2010 almost two-thirds of plaintiffs were blue-collar workers. Whereas previously only large sums were disputed with employers, the amounts have decreased significantly: Supported by the AK, employees are no longer prepared to accept even "minor" injustices without objection.
Florian Wenninger, is a historian and head of the Institut für Historische Sozialforschung, Vienna.
Translation: Anne Thomas
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