General Confederation of Labour (France)

Confédération Générale du Travail
General Confederation of Labour
FoundedSeptember 1895
HeadquartersMontreuil, France
Location
  • France
Members
640,000[1]
General Secretary
Sophie Binet (since 2023)
AffiliationsITUC, ETUC
Websitewww.cgt.fr
A CGT banner during a 2005 demonstration in Paris

The General Confederation of Labour (French: Confédération Générale du Travail, CGT[a]) is a national trade union center, founded in 1895 in the city of Limoges. It is 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).[2]

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.[3]

  1. ^ Dalton, Matthew; Bisserbe, Noemie (2023-01-27). "French Union Cuts Power to Pressure Macron on Pensions". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Archived from the original on Mar 20, 2023.
  2. ^ Numbers given by Michel Dreyfus, author of Histoire de la C.G.T., Ed. Complexes, 1999, interviewed in Pascal Riché, En prônant la négociation, la CGT "peut faire bouger le syndicalisme", Rue 89, 21 November 2007 (in French)
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference R89_07 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).


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