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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2024
Today, the French word “syndicat” designates both an association of workers and a group of producers or business concerns. In the nineteenth century, it was identified with “associations of resistance” which the law called “workers’ coalitions” and which were associations of workers, de facto or de jure, formed to improve the lot of the working class by one means or another. In this study we shall consider such organizations exclusively.
1. We are not considering the Hispano-Latin unions which operate in an atmosphere closer to the 19th century than to the 20th.
2. To the two main unions which grew out of the old C.G.T. must be added the Christian C.F.T.C., important during the past ten years, as well as numerous independent or autono mous unions which too often quarrel jealously about "ideas" on which they pretend to have a monopoly.
3. This distrust was justified in doctrine by E. Vandervelde in his book Le socialisme contre l'Etat (Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1918), written against the "militant socialism" in which Ger mans and Russians had seen the prologue to working-class socialism (1919).
4. Some approximate wage-earner to salaried ratios:
Management staff and civil service workers are included in the salaried group.
5. Those concluded at the Renault and SNECMA plants have opened a new way to effec tive and democratic syndicalism.