SUD banner in a 2005 demonstration in Paris
The Group of 10 (G10 - Solidaires) is a French group of trade unions, most of which have a name based on Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques or commonly SUD ("solidarian, united, democratic").
They tend to favor progressive or even radical views and work with the alter-globalization or anti-globalization movement. The Group of 10 and the SUD Unions are part of the European Social Forum and the World Social Forum.
The Group of 10 was created in 1981 by autonomous unions, as the SNUI, first Union in the French Finances Administration, or the SNJ, organising Journalists. Most of them were Unions refusing the 1946 split between Force Ouvrière and the Confédération Générale du Travail and choosing their autonomy. But several of those Unions decided to join UNSA - an alliance of moderated Unions - in 1993, soon after Sud-PTT joined the Group of 10.
The first SUD union was created in 1988 after a split with the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail or commonly CFDT. The CFDT expelled several unions from the health and the post and telecommunications federations located in the Paris region because they supported wildcat strikes self-organised by the workers. The expelled post and telecommunication unions decided to create a new federation, Sud-PTT, which got encouraging electoral results a few monthes later.
SUD's success with the workers come from its rank-and-file sensibility, and its commitment to sharing and renewing the leadership. SUD defends Social Movement Unionism by working with several movements: illegal immigrants, the "sans-papiers", unemployed people, etc. These two characteristics differentiated SUD from the other French unions.
The successes of SUD in La Poste and France Télécom convinced other unions from the left wing of the CFDT to create similar unions in their professional sectors and several new SUD unions were formed following the mass public sector strikes of November and December 1995 and May and June 2003. SUD unions are now important in health sector, education, transport sectors, including the SNCF and Air France, cultural institutions as Le Louvre, as well as in some companies such as Michelin, Thales, etc. or even students with Sud-étudiant.
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