130 years is worth celebrating!

By Maryse Dumas, trade unionist

On June 13th, we are all invited to a big birthday party. It will take place in the evening on the forecourt of Montreuil town hall. The CGT will celebrate its 130th anniversary there. Everything is planned for a joyful evening of brotherhood and solidarity, because there is no question of forgetting the world's major problems in the slightest. The celebration will give us the strength and enthusiasm to continue our daily, much-needed struggles. The CGT will not truly reach its 130th anniversary until September, on the 23rd to be exact. It was on this date, in fact, that in 1895, in Limoges, 28 federations of industries and trades, 18 labor exchanges, and 126 independent unions founded the General Confederation of Labor, the first trade union confederation created in France, whose development and structuring influenced all the others. Initiatives are also planned in Limoges next September and throughout the coming semester.

The celebration in Montreuil will therefore be a launch more than a culmination. There is no question of a culmination! The CGT continues its fight. Just as its founders never imagined, when they created the CGT, that after many vicissitudes, but also great moments of struggle and social and democratic conquests, it would still be there 130 years later, we cannot know today what the future will be of this organization without which our country would not be quite what it is. The only thing we can be certain of is that the need for workers to organize themselves to gain respect, to fight and win rights will be present as long as capitalist exploitation lasts. It is up to the CGT to make the necessary efforts at renewal within itself to be the one that best responds to this need and to the no less important need to fundamentally transform work and society. The vision of the role of trade unionism advocated by the CGT marks its specificity in the national and international trade union landscape.

In Amiens in 1906, its congress adopted a motion known as the "Amiens Charter" which assigned a "double task" to trade unionism: both the defense of the immediate and daily interests of workers and the stubborn fight for the end of "wage labor and management," in other words, the end of capitalist exploitation. Subsequently, after splits, reunifications, dissolutions, and reconstitutions, the CGT would define itself as a "class and mass" trade unionism: class-based to defend the exploited class against the exploiting class, in other words, labor against capital; mass-based because, to achieve this, it was necessary to be able to unite and bring together all the exploited. Hence the CGT's desire to organize itself so that all categories of employees could feel concerned by its activity and be included in it. Hence a unitary strategy aimed at the whole of trade unionism. Hence, a relationship with politics that is both a desire for independence, which does not mean neutrality, and a search for possible rallies to bring about a profound transformation of society and oppose the major risk, today as yesterday, of the extreme right. To remain itself, the CGT needs to constantly evolve. This will be one of the challenges of its next congress. But, for now, let's celebrate!