ABSTRACT
From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards an internationalisation took place of the workforce in the restaurant and hotel business. The rise of elite and middle-class tourism and the spreading in space and time of tourist activities stimulated the migration of the hotel and restaurant personnel that catered to this public. 2 The pre-1914 Brussels hotels, restaurants and cafés provide a good example of this internationalisation of the labour market in hospitality. It appears from Scholliers’s study of a Brussels street of restaurants, rue de la Fourche, that in the course of the nineteenth century the proportion of foreign workers increased gradually: while in the years 1846–56, 85 per cent of the hospitality workers employed in the street were born in Belgium, in the period 1890–1900 this figure had fallen to 31 per cent. 3 An unpublished master thesis looking into the background of hotel and restaurant personnel in five other Brussels streets and two squares also points to the fall in the proportion of native Belgians. 4 Belgium’s dense railroad network, the relative ease of travelling by train and the fact that after 1861 foreigners wishing to work in Belgium were no longer bothered by border controls or passport regulations all undoubtedly encouraged the migration of hospitality workers. As long as foreign workers did not disturb public order, did not commit crimes, abstained from political activities and had a source of income, they were free to stay in Belgium and to offer their services to Belgian employers. 5
