French Confederation of Christian Workers

The Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens ( CFTC ) ( French Confederation of Christian Workers ) is a French Trade Union Confederation of Christian Democratic alignment with currently about 130,000 members.

History

The association was founded in 1919 by the merger of 321 trade unions. The programmatic leaned against the Catholic social teaching of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII. of. Therefore, it was a revolution, as the instrument itself saw the communist CGT federation competition, always rejected by the CFTC in favor of reforms.

In 1964, a decided majority of the members of the CFTC for the secularization and renamed the French Democratic Confederation du Travail CFDT. About ten percent of the members left the organization and subsequently founded the CFTC new.

Political orientation

The CFTC is politically further to the right than the CFDT, his voters are mostly Christian democratic and conservative politicians close, about the former UDF and UMP today. It is the only trade union federation of France, whose members often than average voted with the French presidential election in 2002 for the extreme-right candidate Le Pen. He received from them in the first round 19 % of the vote as opposed to 39 % for the conservative candidate Jacques Chirac and only 3 percent for the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin. In 2012, explained 42% of its members to cast their votes for Nicolas Sarkozy as opposed to 20 % for François Hollande and 12% each for François Bayrou and Marine Le Pen