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:
“A writer who writes, “I am alone” ... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.”
—Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907)
“When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination. When he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Wherever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognized as such, was what constituted reality for him.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)