At the turn of the century, the working class established organisations corresponding to almost all existing bourgeois associations. The workers' reaction to the upheaval in Finnish society at the turn of the century was powerful. . Over the decades, the material housed by the Finnish Labour Archives has grown to occupy over four kilometres of shelf space. The documents describing the organisation of the trades is equal in bulk to the political archives. Comprehensive material has been preserved on the operations of the trade union movement, both on the national and local level.
Researchers have the use of convenient microfilm reading devices with photocopying capability.
The reading of documents of party committees and parliamentary factions, Ty mies Magazine or statistics of the terror of 1918 is easy with these machines. Searching through the material in the archives will become considerably easier in the next few years when the archives' lists have been transferred to a computer. The customer will then be able to get a listing of the material in the chosen field very rapidly. The Commission of Finnish Labour Tradition operates in association with the Finnish Labour Archives. This collection, amounting to almost 200,000 pages, can be used with the aid of indexes of place names and contents.