Confédération générale du travail
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| Full name | General Confederation of Labour |
|---|---|
| Founded | September 1895 |
| Members | 710,000 |
| Affiliation | ITUC, ETUC |
| Key people | Philippe Martinez |
| Office location | Montreuil, France |
| Country | France |
| Website | www.cgt.fr |
The General Confederation of Labour (French: Confédération générale du travail, CGT) is a national trade union center, the first of the five major French confederations of trade unions.
It is the largest in terms of votes (32.1% at the 2002 professional election, 34.0% in the 2008 election), and second largest in terms of membership numbers.
Its membership decreased to 650,000 members in 1995–96 (it had more than doubled when François Mitterrand was elected President in 1981), before increasing today to between 700,000 and 720,000 members, slightly fewer than the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT).
According to the historian M. Dreyfus, the direction of the CGT is slowly evolving, since the 1990s, during which it cut all organic links with the French Communist Party (PCF), in favour of a more moderate stance. The CGT is concentrating its attention, in particular since the 1995 general strikes, to trade-unionism in the private sector. The CGT was most recently in the news for briefly delaying Stage 3 of the Tour de France on July 7, 2008.
The CGT was founded in 1895 from the merger of the Fédération des bourses du travail (Federation of Labour Councils) and the Fédération nationale des syndicats (National Federation of Trade Unions).
Up until 1919 the CGT was dominated by anarcho-syndicalist tendencies, with Émile Pouget as vice-secretary and leader of the union from 1906 to 1909. The CGT was violently opposed to both the authorities and employers. Moreover, it refused to become affiliated with a political party.
In 1906, the Charte d'Amiens (Amiens Charter) proclaimed the independence of this trade union.
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