ABeyond the challenge to the pension reform, which has inflated the sails of its radical wing (refineries, chemicals, energy, garbage collectors), the CGT is playing its future in the medium term. With the violence of its heartbreaks, its 53e congress, from March 27 to 31 in Clermont-Ferrand, could have resulted in a new bunkerization of the plant. However, a dramatic turn of events resulted in a historic change, one hundred and twenty-eight years after its creation in 1895, with the election as Secretary General of Sophie Binet, until then Secretary General of the Union Générale senior engineers and technicians (Ugict). A double revolution: the 41-year-old former principal education adviser is a feminist who will have to change the somewhat macho image of the CGT, and a manager who will have to deal with the still working-class culture of the union.
For Philippe Martinez, who celebrated his 62nd birthday on 1is April, at the end of an eight-year mandate, the potion is particularly bitter. Its activity report was rejected on March 28, by 50.32% of the votes – a first – automatically ruining the chances of its “runner-up”, Marie Buisson, to gain access to the head of the plant. To this severe snub was added the election of an activist whom no one had seen coming and whom he had always kept away.
Contract out of play
This earthquake is a double revenge of history. In 1992, Alain Obadia, secretary general of Ugict, then 43 years old, had in vain believed his time had come to become the number one of the CGT. “Now we have to go beyondsaid Mr. Obadia at the time, the heaviness inherited from an old approach marked by a conception of alliance between executives and the working class which considered that the activity in the direction of engineers and executives was more a matter of public relations, of the general debate on economic questions than of concrete protest activity. »
In 2012, Bernard Thibault had innovated by defending until the end the candidacy of Nadine Prigent to take over. However, he had been put in the minority by his national confederal committee (CCN) and Thierry Lepaon had been elected by default in 2013.
Since then, the CGT crisis has deepened. While she had, in 1996, cut the transmission belt with the French Communist Party so as not to be dragged down in its fall, its decline accelerated. In the early 1970s, the central flirted with two million members and thought to reach the goal of three million. In 2020, the latest official figures, it only had 606,000 inserts. And, supreme humiliation, she lost, at the end of 2018, her first place in the professional elections, dethroned by the CFDT. Elected in 2015 under controversial conditions, Mr. Martinez, from the metallurgy industry, while judging that “trade unionism is, in essence, reformist”, relied on its radical wing, without ever really getting its rallying point. Not signing any inter-professional agreement, still in opposition to the government, the CGT, out of the contractual game, has isolated itself.
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