From 1898 to 1900 the Federal Committee was trying to systematize the services of the placement and of the viaticum. The suggestion came from some Bourses, which particularly felt this necessity. Some Bourses had already been placing workingmen at a distance through correspondence. They wanted to generalize this by having the Federal Committee publish statistics of the fluctuations of employment in the various Bourses. On the other hand, the Bourses had difficulties with the service of viaticum. The diversity of conditions in this respect gave rise to dissatisfaction, while the Bourses were unable to control abuses. The secretaries could not know the number of visits paid them by workingmen, nor the amounts received by each.
At the Congress of Rennes (1898), the Federal Committee presented a plan of a “federal viaticum”, and in 1900, the Office national de statistique et de placement was organized. The “federal viaticum” was optional for members of the federation, and though presenting certain advantages for the Bourses, was accepted by very few of them. Organized in 1899, it functioned unsatisfactorily.
The Office national began activity in June, 1900. It was organized with the financial aid of the government. In 1900, after the Universal Exhibition, Paris was overcrowded with unemployed workingmen, and the government thought it could make use of the Federation of Bourses to disperse them over the country. Before that, in November, 1899, the Federal Committee had addressed the government for a subsidy of 10,000 francs to organize the Office national. In June, 1900, the Government granted 5,000 francs. The Office began to publish a weekly statistical bulletin containing the information on the fluctuation of employment sent to the Federal Committee by the Bourses. The Office, however, did not give the expected results. In organizing these services, the Federation of Bourses always kept in mind the interests of the syndicats. It directed workingmen to employers who satisfied the general conditions imposed by the syndicats. The viaticum also served to diminish competition among workingmen in ordinary times, or during strikes.
In all its activity the Federal Committee generally followed the same policy. It called the attention of one Bourse to the experiments and to the achievements of others; it made its own suggestions and recommendations and it carried out the decisions of the Congresses. It did not regard itself as a central organ with power to command. Constituted on a federalist basis, the Bourses expected from the Federal Committee merely the preliminary study of problems of a common interest, reserving for themselves the right to reject both the problems and the study; they considered even their Congresses merely as foyers where the instruments of discussion and of work were forged.[97]
The activity of the Federal Committee was handicapped by insufficiency of means. The financial state of the Federation between 1892 and 1902 may be gathered from the following table:
| Receipts | Expenses | |||
| Francs | Centimes | Francs | Centimes | |
| 1892-1893 | 247 | 209 | 45 | |
| 1893-1894 | 573 | 95 | 378 | 95 |
| 1894-1895 | 1,342 | 55 | 960 | 07 |
| 1895-1896 | 2,380 | 05 | 1,979 | |
| 1896-1897 | 2,310 | 75 | 1,779 | 45 |
| 1897-1900 | 6,158 | 75 | 5,521 | 45 |
| 1900-1901 | 4,297 | 85 | 3,029 | 71 |
| 1901-1902 | 5,541— | 85 | 4,320 | 80 |
The Bourses paid their dues irregularly and Pelloutier complained that with such means the Committee could not render all the services it was capable of and that it was necessarily reduced to the rôle of a correspondence bureau, “slow and imperfect in its working.”
Whatever others may have thought of the results obtained by the Federation of Bourses, the leaders themselves felt enthusiastic about the things accomplished. Pelloutier wrote:
Enumerate the results obtained by the groupings of workingmen; consult the program, of the courses instituted by the Bourses du Travail, a program which omits nothing which goes to make up a moral, complete, dignified and satisfied life; regard the authors who inhabit the workingmen's libraries; admire this syndical and co-operative organization which extends from day to day and embraces new categories of producers, the unification of all the proletarian forces into a close network of syndicats, of co-operative societies, of leagues of resistance; consider the constantly increasing intervention into the diverse manifestations of social life; the examination of methods of production and of distribution and say whether this organization, whether this program, this tendency towards the beautiful and the good, whether this aspiration toward the complete expansion of the individual do not justify the pride the Bourses du Travail feel.[98]
This feeling and the preoccupation with socialist ideals led Pelloutier and other members of the Federation to think that the Bourses du Travail could not only render immediate services, but that they were capable of “adapting themselves to a superior social order”. Pelloutier thought that the Bourses du Travail were evolving from this time on the elements of a new society, that they were gradually constituting a veritable socialist (economic and anarchic) state within the bourgeois state,[99] and that they would, in time, substitute communistic forms of production and of distribution for those now in existence. The question was brought up for discussion at the Congress of Tours (1896) and two reports were read on the present and future rôle of the Bourses du Travail. One report was written by Pelloutier, the other was prepared by the delegates of the Bourse of Nimes, Claude Gignoux and Victorien Briguier (Allemanists).