Bourse Du Travail - Outside France

Outside France

The Bourse du Travail idea was exported along with French imperialism. The FBT's full name was actually Fédération des Bourses du Travail de France et des Colonies, though in practice this meant there were sections in the French settler dominated parts of Algeria. These declined with their French counterparts, and did not survive the anticolonial struggle.

In Subsaharan Africa, Bourses du Travail were implanted in two ways. In French controlled regions, labor unions were organized by the CGT in the 1930s and 1940s. Their labour halls were styled Bourses du travail, some of which remain as centers of union activity.

The rulers of Belgian Congo created a Bourse du travail at Katanga in 1910 as a state controlled hiring hall, in an attempt to lure labor to areas of planned industrial (mostly mining) concentration. Attempts by local officials to recast this cynically created employment agency into a more worker run operation suggest that the idea of a Bourse du travail never lost its syndicalist connotations.