Victorian Trades Hall is considered to be the oldest workers’ hall in the world. From its origins in one of the first successful campaigns for an eight-hour working day, it has played a significant role in Victorian and Australian social, political, industrial and economic history. Now, the Hall’s international importance is being recognised.

Victorian Trades Hall and Broken Hill Trades Hall are part of a transnational World Heritage nomination of workers assembly halls along with sites in Denmark and  Belgium.

The World Heritage List recognises places that are of outstanding value to humanity. Yet there are few places on the List that explicitly reflect the immense contribution made by working people to the cultural heritage of the world.  This nomination of workers’ assembly halls is designed to address this notable gap.

From the 1850s, the global labour movement played a pivotal role in the rise of democracy and worker and human rights across the world. The buildings that are being nominated bear special testimony to the daily work of the labour movement as a major force in shaping democracy and welfare states, transforming the world of work, extending concepts of rights, and providing support for important social movements, including the women’s and anti-colonial struggles across the world.

Each workers’ hall within this nomination represents an element of the organisational history of the labour movement that developed independently of the states in which they were located. While the ideas and values of the organised labour movement, and the halls which form their physical manifestation, have roots in a European tradition, their migration with the great population movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries to virtually all corners of the globe was a truly universal phenomenon.