The Association for the History of the Workers Movement was founded in 1959. Their goal is to catalog the historical sources and materials that pertain to the workers movement and to make them available to the public. Members dues as well as public funds finance it. In the late eighties they had 1,400 people use the archive per year. A third of those researchers were from foreign institutions.
The Association had 9,571 brochures as well as 9,109 periodicals at their disposal, in addition to almost 20,000 books. The socialist workers movements of Germany, Scandinavia, and other regions of the world are also featured in their materials. They have been increasing their focus on international movements as time goes on. In 1986 they helped to create the Vienna 1880-1938 exhibit at Centre Pompidou in Paris. They have traditionally had contacts with the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation in Bonn as well. The Association for the History of the Workers Movement has also worked internationally to produce exhibits on the workers movement before 1914 and the first First of May Celebrations.
In 1985 they began cooperating with the Institute for European History at Columbia University in New York. Their efforts resulted in two summer workshops, one of which was held by Wolfgang Maderthaner and Helmut Gruber in the Viennese Europa-Verlag in 1988.
In February, 2011 they celebrated fifty years of the VGA. They opened the Viktor Adler Gedenkraum and had talks on Austrian socialism from its creation until the turn of the century. They are still operating as a research institution.