General Confederation of Labour

The General Confederation of Labour 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, and second largest in terms of membership numbers.

Its membership decreased to 650,000 members in 1995–96, before increasing today to between 700,000 and 720,000 members, slightly fewer than the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail.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, 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.