During the government of Count Eduard Taaffe a series of social laws were enacted in Austria that set maximum hours in factories and mines, placed restrictions on the employment of women and young people, and introduced accident and sickness insurance. With this legislation, Austria obtained a unique position: no other country had both extensive protective labor legislation, including the ”normal workday,” and obligatory sickness and accident insurance for industrial workers on its law books in the early 1890s. Despite this progressive record, social policymaking in the Taaffe era has drawn surprisingly little attention. My article begins to fill this gap. The first section briefly examines the historiography of social legislation to demonstrate that the interpretations of the early development of Austrian social politics in the 1880s have been unduly determined by the ”Bismarckian paradigm.” The second section discusses the models that Austrian legislators in the 1880s used for their social policies. They were influenced not only by German social insurance but also by the Swiss Factory Act of 1877. Austrian politicians thus followed two quite distinct strategies in tackling the ”labor question”: they promoted both protective legislation, which infringed upon the employer's authority to organize production at his own discretion, and social insurance, which involved state interference with the lives of workers outside the workshop or factory. The third section examines the motives of Austrian politicians behind this twofold labor policy by looking into the background and procedures of legislation. The final section offers a tentative assessment of social politics during the Taaffe era.