Labor Exchange Scrip

A History & Catalog of Minnesota Obsolete Bank Notes & Scrip has detailed articles about this and other major categories of obsolete bank notes.  Order your copy from the books section of R. M. Smythe & Co. today.

Giovanni DeBernardi was an immigrant with ideas to empower labor.  He founded an organization known as the Labor Exchange, which capitalized labor.  In the late 1890s there were hundreds of branches of the Labor Exchange, which issued notes denominated in units of a days work, or fractions thereof.  There were a handful of branches in Minnesota.