While the Bourses and industrial federations attended to the particular, local and administrative interests of their respective organizations, the General Confederation of labor intervened or took the initiative in questions that interested all or a considerable part of all workingmen. The new statutes went into force on January 1, 1903. The elections secured the predominance of the revolutionary syndicalists in the Confederal Committee; Griffuelhes was elected secretary of the Confederation; Pouget, assistant; Yvetot, secretary of the Section of Bourses. In October of the same year the Confederal Committee was summoned to an extraordinary meeting to consider the question of the suppression of employment bureaus. This question had agitated a considerable part of the working-class for many years. The workingmen had protested time and again against the methods and procedure of these bureaus, and their protests had been found to be well founded by all who investigated the matter.[188] The methods of the employment bureaus had been condemned in Parliament, and the Chamber had passed a bill to suppress the employment bureaus with indemnity in 1901-2. The Senate, however, rejected it in February, 1902, and the question was dropped indefinitely. [188] Senator Paul Straus in _La Grande Revue_ (Feb., 1914), pp. 320 _et seq._ The workingmen of the food-producing industries (_alimentation_) were particularly interested in the suppression of the employment bureaus. In October, 1903, exasperated by the fact that twenty-five years of lobbying and of petitioning had produced no results, they decided to take the matter into their own hands. October 29th, a "veritable riot" took place in the _Bourse du Travail_ of Paris, the police used their arms, and many were wounded on both sides.[189] [189] _Journal des Débats_ (Nov. 6, 1903), p. 865. The Confederal Committee decided to lend its help to the workingmen in the struggle. It appointed a special committee to direct the movement. The plan adopted was to carry on a wide agitation for some time and then to arrange protest-meetings on the same day in all industrial centers of France. December 5, 1903, hundreds of meetings were held all over France, at which the same demand was made that the employment offices be abolished. The meetings were arranged with the help of the _Bourses du Travail_ which appear in all such cases as the centers of agitation. November 5, 1903, the Chamber, by 495 votes against 14, voted a law suppressing the Employment Bureaus within a period of five years, with an indemnity of six million francs. In February, 1904, the law passed the Senate with some modifications.