Today, social justice is an ever-present ideal — frequently invoked in public debates and political campaigns. Yet a gap persists between its popular use and its analytical meaning. This gap limits our understanding of what social justice means to people and how they evaluate their living and working conditions. This historical research project set out to reshape the study of labour, democracy, social welfare, and social justice by analysing how ideas of justice were imagined and experienced in workplaces in Austria and Czechoslovakia between 1938 and 1989. It examined how employees understood social justice, traced continuities and ruptures from the Nazi period through the Cold War, and questioned the conventional division between socialist Eastern and democratic Western Europe.
Although social justice is often associated with democracy, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes have also drawn heavily on the language of fairness and equality. The project, therefore, posed a central question: Why and how did people continue to engage with ideas of social justice even under illiberal or authoritarian governments? It approached social justice as a deeply subjective concept — a moral compass through which individuals assessed the fairness of their workplaces and societies.
By investigating how men and women imagined, claimed, and negotiated justice in their everyday working lives, the research revealed how notions of fairness, equality, and welfare evolved across radically different political systems and ideologies— from Nazism to post-war democracy and State Socialism.
Focusing on Austria and Czechoslovakia placed central Europe at the heart of this inquiry. This comparative perspective bridged the long-standing divide between East and West and highlighted enduring continuities in how fairness and entitlement were imagined, articulated, and institutionalised across the twentieth century.
