MENU
International Trade Union History and Memory Network
Search

Libraries and Archives

Austria

Brazil

Chile

Chilean national archives include the two largest archives in Santiago and a network of regional archives. These collections are composed of state records, and few are digitized.

In Santiago, the National Archive (Archivo Nacional) focuses mostly on documentation from the colonial era to the nineteenth century. While there are no specific labor or union archives, it has created some special digitized collections that highlight labor topics:

  • Matanza de la Escuela de Santa María de Iquique: A selection of digitized documents referring to the massacre of nitrate workers in Iquique in 1907.
  • The Archivo Nacional de la Administracion del Estado (ARNAD), also located in Santiago, includes ministerial documents from the twentieth century. For people studying labor, the most important collections are the Department of Labor and the Ministry of Labor. Because of the characteristics Additionally, historians have worked with other social archives that addressed labor issues, such as the Ministry of Health or Housing.
  • The Archivo Regional de Tarapacá in Iquique is relevant for studying the nitrate era and the far north. For example, they hold maps, documents, and photographs related to the history of the Santiago Humberston nitrate company: https://www.archivonacional.gob.cl/multimedia/oficina-salitrera-de-iquique-santiago-humberstone-archivo-regional-de-tarapaca
  • The Archivo General de la Araucanía in Temuco is relevant for those studying the south, including topics such as indigenous history and rural labour. 

Canada

  • Library and Archives Canada: Canada's national library and archives contains holdings relating to the federal government, its labour policies, and many labour organizations and trade unions such as the Canadian Labour Congress and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).
  • Workers Arts and Heritage Centre: the collection of the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre encompasses artifacts relating to both paid and unpaid work. This includes a large digital collection of buttons from Canadian labour movements.

Germany

  • Archive in the House of History of the Ruhr: The Archive in the House of History of the Ruhr is supported by the History of the Ruhr Foundation and was founded together with the foundation in 1998. The archive contains the collections of various trade unions such as IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie.
  • Friedrich Ebert Foundation: The Friedrich Ebert Foundation (German: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Abbreviation: FES) has three main fields of activity regarding the history of trade unions. It supports historical research on trade unions and labour history, it engages in the distribution of research results on trade unions to the public and it consults trade unions on historical matters and memory work. The foundation initiates and consults research projects, organizes conferences and events and edits publications on trade union history. On these matters the foundation cooperates with the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung.
    • The Archive of Social Democracy as part of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (German: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Abbreviation: FES) was opened in June 1969 and is today one of the largest archives about the labour movement in Germany. In addition to holdings on German social democracy, it contains materials from German and international trade unions such the archival footage of the umbrella association of German trade unions (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund DGB) and the majority of the individual German trade unions. This collection comprises approximately 20 km of files. 
    • The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung publishes sources on the history of the German trade union movement in the 20th century.
    • The archive also contains interviews with German trade unionists. In the archive the complete interviews can be used for matters of research. Extracts of the interviews are presented in video and audio clips on the homepage “Zeitzeugen der Gewerkschaften” (contemporary witnesses of the trade unions). This collection of oral history of trade unionists is being established in cooperation with the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung.
  • Archive of company agreements of the Hans Böckler Foundation: The Archive has existed since the 1950s and is the central documentation place for collective bargaining policy of the German Trade Union Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund DGB).
  • Archive and library of the Fritz Hüser Institute for Literature and Culture of the Working World: The focus of the collection is on literature as well as audio and visual documents of the world of work since the late 18th century, with the holdings gradually being added to as far back as the 16th century.
  • Free German Trade Union Federation (German: Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund or FDGB): The FDGB was the umbrella organization of the individual trade unions in the territory of the Soviet Occupation Zone from 1945 to 1949 and thereafter in the German Democratic Republic until 1990.
  • Library of the Ruhr: The "Library of the Ruhr" is an institution belonging to both the "History of the Ruhr Foundation" and the "Institute for Social Movements". Its catalogue includes items concerning both the past and present of the Ruhr region, the economic and social history characterised by heavy industry, the history and sociology of social movements, the social history of the nineteenth and twentieth century and technological, economic, social and legal aspects of the mining industry.
  • Library of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB): The basic stock of the DGB library comprises comes from trade union libraries that have been looted after the National Socialist takeover. Later the collection was supplemented by new publications and today includes almost all German-language publications on the German trade union movement for the time from 1945 onwards.
  • Library of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung: This library was opened in June 1969 as part of the Archive of Social Democracy, with its roots going back to the time of the early German labour movement. Its collection mainly comprises titles on the history and current developments of the German and international labour movement with a focus on German social democracy, as well as publications of parties and trade unions from Germany and also other selected European countries.

Greece

  • Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI): The archives and the library of ASKI compose one of the most significant set of sources regarding the history of the Greek labour movement of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. It consists of records of various left parties and trade-unions in Greece, socialist and communist journals and newspapers, brochures, posters, image collections, private archives of politicians, intellectuals and trade-unionists. It covers the period from the late nineteenth century to the present day with an emphasis laid in the National Resistance and the Greek Civil War during 1940s, as well as in the development of the labour and social movements in the postwar period.
  • Education Center “Charilaos Florakis” (EKXF) and Communist Party of Greece (KKE): The library of EKXF and the archives of KKE consist of the records of the Party, socialist and communist newspapers and journals, brochures, image collections and private archives of communist activists. It covers the period from the early twentieth century to the present day, although the emphasis is laid in the National Resistance and the Greek Civil War during 1940s, as well as in the development of the labour and communist movement in the postwar period.
  • General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE): The Labour Institute of GSEE holds the archive of the Confederation. The archive covers mainly the history of GSEE, its Congresses and its correspondence with other trade-unions and services, during the postwar period.
  • General State Archives of Greece (GAK): The central service of GAK does not hold any significant part of the archives regarding the trade unions. An exception could be the archive of the trial court of Piraeus, which include charters of various trade unions since 1919. However, several regional branches of GAK hold archives of labour centers, as well as archives of municipalities and communities, which in some cases include the archives of rural cooperatives.
  • Library of the Hellenic Parliament: The library of the Hellenic Parliament holds a variety of labour and socialist newspapers of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. The newspapers are digitized and openly accessible.
  • Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA): ELIA holds at its disposal the private archive of one significant and controversial figure of the trade-union movement during the Interwar period in Greece, Aristeidis Dimitratos. In addition, ELIA holds the private archive of a prominent figure of the Trotskyist movement in Greece, Christos Anastasiadis. In addition, the library of ELIA holds a variety of socialist newspapers and publications of the nineteenth and the twentieth century.
  • Benaki Museum: Benaki Museum holds the archive of one of the most prominent leading figures of the Greek socialist movement during the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Stavros Kallergis.
  • Cultural Center of Lefkada: The Cultural Center of Lefkada holds the private archive and the library of Nikolaos Svoronos, a communist veteran of the National Resistance and the most prominent Greek Marxist historian, who lived in Paris as a political exile from 1945 το 1975. The archive consists of communist newspapers and brochures, manuscripts and unpublished dissertations.
  • International Institute of Social History (IISG): In the International Institute of Social History there are many archival collections associated with Greece like the “Greece social and political developments collection” and the “Greece periodical collection.” In addition, information about the labour movement in Greece during the early twentieth century and the Interwar period can be found in the archives of the Socialist Youth-International and of Camille Huysmans.
  • Society for Thessalian Research (ETHE): The Society for Thessalian Research holds the private archive of a prominent communist intellectual and politician, Giannis Kordatos, who had written the first history of the Greek labour movement during the interwar period. The archive consists of manuscripts, newspapers and journals, correspondence and images, covering mostly the period from the 1920s to 1960.
  • Local labour centres and trade unions: In the various local labour centers there are significant sources regarding the history of the labour movement. The degree of classification and accessibility of the archives of labour centers and various trade unions vary and should be examined on a case-by-case basis. The same rule applies to the archives, which are held by various first and second level trade unions.

Hungary

India

  • Archives of Indian Labour has been a pioneering initiative in setting up digital archives of labour history of modern India. It was set up in July, 1998 as a collaborative project of the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute and the Association of Indian Labour Historians. At the moment there are around 25 digital collections that are continuously growing and more collections are underway. There are several collections that contain material on trade union history and memory:
  • Extended Archives of Indian Labour
    • Labour Regulation in the Long Twentieth Century is conceived as a digital repository on labour regulations in India and one of the result of Thematic Module Labour as a Political Category under Merian-Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies: 'Metamorphoses of the Political (ICAS:MP), an interdisciplinary forum for intellectual exchange funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The repository is also an element of a larger project of multilateral cooperation that aims at creating "Extended Archives of Indian Labour"
    • In this collection, you might like to have a look at The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) Pamphlets Collection 1928-1990. This collection of printed pamphlets traces the origin and evolution of the organisation of the AITUC as the first All India Federation of Trade Unions. It also contains pamphlets containing the position of the AITUC on economic policy, major legislations concerned with labour and accounts of important events connected with the history of industrial relations in India. 
  • Archives of All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC): Over the last few years co-operation between AITUC, CeMIS, AILH and IISG successfully digitized parts of the central archives of All India Trade Union Congress and made it available for the public through the archival portal of IISG (Collection Summary: All India Trade Union Congress Archives) and from the Archives of Indian labour online portal (Archives of Indian Labour: Records). Over the next few years, more than 4000 new files will be digitized and subsequently made available to researchers and the public at large. Details about this collection are available online on these respective portals.
  • Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), Modern Indian History Research Group, Digital Collections & Online Databases: The Modern Indian History Research group at CeMIS has been involved in setting up a number of projects and intiative around history of labour. The Enid Perlin collection contains the oral oral histories of Coimbatore cotton textile mill workers collected by Enid Perlin. Comprising of interviews conducted with 145 millworkers, the data collected by Enid Perlin during her doctoral field-work presents a rich life history of cotton textile mill-workers in Coimbatore, spanning close to 4 decades from the early 1930s to 1975-76. This data will be made public on the CeMIS website and through other digital archive sources.  For more details on this, please see this document.
  • Center for Education and Communication (CEC): The Center for Education and Communication (CEC) is a Delhi-based organization engaged in labour research and advocacy. They have recently launched a Digital Labour Archive (DLA) which is an excellent repository and documentation initiative developed by CEC with the support of Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS)-South Asia. It focuses on the contemporary period and on informal labour. DLA has a rich collection of materials, such as trade union correspondence, pamphlets, photographs, booklets, cartoons, letters, petitions, newspaper clippings, magazines, reports, interviews of trade union activists, labour scholars and worker leaders.

Kenya

Mexico

Nepal

  • National Archives of Nepal: Located in Kathmandu, the National Archives of Nepal is a repository of historical documents, records, and manuscripts. It contains materials that cover various aspects of Nepal's history, including labor movements and trade unions.
  • Tribhuvan University Central Library: The central library at Tribhuvan University in Kirtipur, Kathmandu, is one of the largest libraries in Nepal. It may have collections related to labor history and trade unions, especially in academic publications. 
  • Nepal National Library: The Nepal National Library in Patan, Lalitpur, is another institution that could house historical documents related to labor movements and trade unions.
  • University research centres: found at Nepali universities, particularly those with a focus on history, sociology, or labour studies
  • Various labour organizations and unions: Trade unions and labor organizations in Nepal may maintain their own archives or collections related to the history of labor movements. Contacting these organizations directly might provide access to firsthand accounts, documents, and records.

Netherlands

  • Biographical Dictionary of Socialism and the Labor Movement in the Netherlands (BWSA): "This contains more than 645 biographies of men and women who played a role in the Dutch labour movement in a broad sense: the well-known leaders, but also less prominent figures; socialists, liberals, anarchists, Catholics, communists and Christians; politicians, trade union officials, free thinkers, suffrage fighters, artists and many others."

Sweden

United States

United Kingdom

Search
Search
close