If lately there are two girls on the head of the 2 primary French business unions, business union organizations are gradual to combine feminist problems. Within the bankruptcy “The End of Male Syndicalism” within the collective paintings “Feminist Theory” (Seoul, September 2025), historian Fanny Gallot recounts their tough feminist transformation inside of a exertions motion that was once to begin with suspicious of girls’s paintings.
If the feminist calls for of business union organizations have lengthy been perceived as dividing the operating category and representing pursuits regarded as bourgeois, they’ve however served as a stimulus, taking part in a elementary position in taking good care of the social {and professional} rights of girls. To higher perceive the present theoretical and activist demanding situations within the articulation between feminist calls for and business union orientations, you will need to go back to the historical past of articulation between those actions.
For the length ahead of 1914, historian Marie-Ellen Zilberberg-Hokar remembers the distrust of the exertions motion in opposition to girls’s paintings, perceived as a risk to males’s wages and the standard group of labor. “Housewife or courtesan,” wrote Pierre-Joseph Proudhon within the mid-Nineteenth century concerning the position of girls in society: their skilled paintings was once now not self-evident on the time. On the flip of the 20 th century, those orientations provide an explanation for their low unionization and the tensions between feminist and union objectives, whilst girls may just now not sign up for a union with out their husband’s approval till the Twenties.
Union resistance to the mixing of girls
In 1901, the Berger-Levrault Affair, analyzed via the historian Francois Chenault, is symbolic of the tensions between feminism and syndicalism: the control of the Berger-Levrault printing space (in Nancy, editor’s notice) invited feminine employees to exchange placing males, which provoked a struggle with the Syndicate of Ladies Typographers. In 1913, a typographer noticed her union club denied at the pretext that she was once married to a union member (the foundation of the issue was once that she herself was once a typographer and that the Literary Affiliation had a dim view of girls’s paintings, editor’s notice): that is the Couriau affair, which obviously illustrates the integrationist resistance of girls to paintings and presentations the integrationist resistance of girls to ladies’s paintings. devaluation of salary stipulations. globally, proscribing the popularity of girls as respectable companions within the social battle.
Industry union organizations thus relegate the calls for for equivalent pay to the background, in desire of the category battle which is regarded as a concern, particularly since girls’s paintings, which might be much less neatly paid, would have a tendency to “pull down wages”.
The one recognized {photograph} of Lucie Baud, undated.
Ladies are then observed as brief employees who convey further source of revenue to the family: it’s the wage of the male breadwinner who must feed the entire circle of relatives.
Pioneering tasks, comparable to the ones of Lucy Bo, business unionist and silk employee, however divulge girls’s involvement in moves and their appropriation of union price range to struggle towards inhumane operating stipulations.
For his or her phase, lecturers arranged themselves into associations, then into unions and find out about teams. (…) Ladies will then vastly take part in moves from Would possibly to June 1936 in all sectors and during the territory.
As Martha Desrumauk coordinated the textile moves within the North, girls in division shops – the place they made up 80% of the body of workers – joined the mobilization and took their jobs even supposing they weren’t at all times neatly gained via males, together with business unionists.
Alternatively, maximum frequently they don’t take the lead in mobilization. Regardless of their energetic participation in moves and the upward thrust in call for for “equal pay for equal work” because the Twenties, the salary hole between men and women persists, with employers and unions clinging to this differentiation. If that call for is officially set via the union constructions beneath the drive of activists, it isn’t a concern and it isn’t taken up via the individuals who take part within the negotiations themselves.
The tough feminist transformation of business unions
After the 2d International Struggle, the advent of girls’s commissions inside the business unions, particularly inside the CGT, marked a turning level. Those constructions, which purpose to interfere particularly with feminine staff, on the other hand, stay restricted of their scope. Best because the Nineteen Sixties has there been important development, even though the speculation of naturalized gender complementarity has persevered to be triumphant inside of unions.
Alternatively, all the way through the “Beauvoir years” studied via the historian Sylvie Chaperon, the motion of feminine activists led to a much broader mobilization of the problem of girls’s unionization.
Because the paintings of sociologist Margaret Maruani has proven, the Seventies represented a decade of disruption marked via the emergence of self sustaining feminist actions and the intensification of work struggles. Those two dynamics, even though other, frequently converged of their calls for. The struggles to legalize birth control and abortion, led via collectives such because the Motion for the Freedom of Abortion and Birth control (MLAC), exert substantial drive on exertions unions, forcing them to take a stand on those problems whilst the primary theorizations of home exertions are being debated.
Ladies activists of the Motion for the Liberation of Abortion and Birth control (MLAC), March 22, 1974, in Paris, all the way through an indication tough the suitable to abortion. AFP.
Confronted with those calls for, CGT and CFDT followed other methods. The CGT creates girls’s sectors, whilst the CFDT integrates those problems in a transversal means. Those approaches mirror other understandings of feminism, but additionally inner problems regarding the distribution of duties and gear members of the family inside of unions.
Thus, in 1970, the CGT nationally rejected the “feminist” conception of equality, which it regarded as slim, and in 1973 it clarified this research: the “feminist” conception in keeping with which society can be constructed “by men and for men” is incorrect.» (…)
The feminist motion was once gaining in significance and the CGT may just now not stay impervious to it, particularly since a brand new technology of business unionists was once shaped on the top of the Would possibly-June motion of 1968. Those adjustments brought about important conflicts. Thus, within the Union Departementale du Rhone there are common tensions, even conflicts between the ladies’s collective of the CGT and the union management, which highlights the lack of the organizations to completely reconcile the battle for girls’s rights and union methods.
Low requirements of activism
On this irritating context, the suicide of the CGT activist Georgette Waher takes position. Intensely concerned within the building of the ladies’s collective, she regrets the everlasting “sticks in the wheel” and the humiliation she suffered within. The day ahead of the twenty ninth Congress of the UD du Rhone, held from October 21 to 23, 1981, Georgette Vaher took her personal existence after up to now leaving at the back of audio tapes through which she tells her tale and explains her movements accusing CGT department leaders. (…)
Within the early Nineteen Eighties, those debates had been additionally waged via CFDT activists who sought to finish “male trade unionism”:
“The situation experienced by women workers is not what men experience and it is not enough for the Organization – that is, the men who are responsible for it – to listen, it is also necessary for the Organization to be able to translate the situations experienced by the entire working class at every moment of trade union life. How could this be achieved if we do not implement a policy of the active presence of women and men workers in all places (pre-ma analysis) men, their way of working, their form of activism, their greater availability introduce, at the lowest level of our structure, a filter, a selection system from which all other levels of the structure suffer» (Excerpt from the report on gender diversity to the National Council (CN) dated May 21, 1981, CFDT Archives, Marcel-Gonin Fonds, quoted in “Faminni Gabilo” standard historical past). Seoul, 2024, p. 159.)
Together with in the community and within the context of working-class girls’s moves, tensions emerge between the norms of male activism and the methods girls enforce to make themselves heard, as sociologist Yves Meuret-Campfort presentations.
New demanding situations
After the Nineteen Eighties, which the economist Rachel Silvera described as a “silent decade” on the subject of union figuring out of feminist problems, the social mobilizations of November-December 1995 marked a renewal, whilst feminisms had been redeployed after the tough feminist demonstrations of November 25, 1999.
Within the CGT, for instance, the Femmes mikite collective was once relaunched in 1993 and demanded parity within the confederation’s constructions, which was once ratified via the confederation’s congress in 1999. On the similar time, the business unionist Marise Dumas, then elected to the confederal administrative center, was once now not managed via the CGT to “specificity”, as a result of, she specifies, “talking about specificity for women means that the center, globally, is majority male”. She provides that “our unionism is feminist because it works for the emancipation and freedom of women.” On this dynamic, FSU, CGT and Solidaires co-organized girls’s inter-unions, beginning in 1997.
Alternatively, regardless of development, many demanding situations stay. The underrepresentation of girls in positions of accountability stays a significant issue, as sociologist Cécile Guillaume presentations in terms of Solidaires, whilst sexist habits and exclusionary practices persist, slowing the upward thrust of activists in union constructions. Implicit gender norms that worth males persist and result in the upkeep of the gender department of union exertions.
Feminist theories, edited via Camille Froidevaux-Méteri, editions du Seuil, 2025.
Any other fresh factor issues the distinction of intersecting oppressions, which calls for rethinking union methods to raised meet the desires of employees, particularly racialized employees or the ones in precarious jobs, as sociologist Sophie Beru presentations. A number of the problems that want to be rethought, we discover “out of work”, in keeping with the time period of Saphia Doumenz, who specializes in the mobilization and union participation of maids in Lyon and Marseille. As the chance of feminist moves develops in many nations, the problem of reproductive paintings, whether or not paid or unpaid, requires business union organizations to rethink their intervention in a deandrocentric strategy to paintings and protest.
