The WFTU has had a chequered past. Established in 1945, it was primarily made up of unions affiliated with or sympathetic to communist parties. In 1995 the CGT took the decision to exit the confederation and join the WFTU’s earlier breakaway element and more ‘Western’ competitor, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU, which later became ITUC). In the same move, a few years later, it also joined the ETUC. In recent times some of its larger trade union federations have migrated back to a what has since become a revamped WFTU. During the 52nd Congress of the CGT, the debate was brought to the confederal level in a more subtle form: no disaffiliation of the ITUC or the ETUC, but the reintroduction of the mention of the WFTU in the confederal texts as a first step to renew with the latter.
Competition between the WFTU and the ITUC (formed in 2006 from the merger between the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the World Confederation of Labour (WCL)) is longstanding and dates back to when in 1949 a number of Western trade unions quit the 1945 established WFTU because of its overarching soviet block tendencies. With the fall of the Berlin wall the WFTU underwent a challenging period but has recently been revamped and is enjoying a certain renaissance. Its w
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