General Confederation of Labour (France)

General Confederation Of Labour (France)

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 double when François Mitterrand was elected President in 1981), before increasing today to between 700,000 and 720,000 members, a bit less 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), to a more moderate stance, and concentrating its attention, in particular since the 1995 general strikes, to trade-unionism in private sectors. Most recently in the news for briefly delaying Stage 3 of the Tour de France on July 7, 2008.

Read more about General Confederation Of Labour (France):  Famous Members

Famous quotes containing the words general and/or labour:

    All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
    Honest labour bears a lovely face;
    Thomas Dekker (1572?–1632?)