Our Archive Treasures

The Labour Archives receives and stores paper documents, electronic documents, recordings, photos and videos from organisations, companies and private persons.

The archives contain information on labour movement organisations, other Finnish organisations and the personal histories of individuals.

The material of the social demographic parties and their local organisations represent the political labour movement. The unions and local organisations of the trade union movement represent the professional labour movement. The other labour movement consists of youth and women movements, labour educational, music and theatre activities, small farmer organisations and the temperance movement. The social sector is represented by shelters for young mothers and insurance funds. Other organisations represent the wide range of organisational activities in Finland from professional students to sexual minorities.

The person archives include archives from national leaders to local decision-makers. The life history collection includes information on many people involved in labour movements.

There are collections on some of the subjects. The collections from the years 1905, 1917 and 1918 are the most important. The collection from 1918 contains crime statistics. The statistics are given with references at the municipal level. In addition to the labour day collection and note collection, smaller collections and press cutting collections covering different sectors are also available. You will find the lists here.

A large part of the minutes of the Social Democratic Party of Finland and many trade unions have been copied to PDF files. The electronic material is increased as resources become available.

There is a database for the labour movement movies that includes information on thousands of movies. There are video copies of Kansan Elokuva films and they can be watched at the Labour Archives. A large collection of videos made with VHS and U-matic technology have been converted to file format.