The CFDT strike fund: a service that doesn’t say its name?

The French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT) is the only French trade union confederation to have a permanent strike fund at the confederal level. Created in 1973, it mainly fulfilled this role until the 1990s. Since then, it has broadened its remit by offering other types of support in the form of services to its members. In this article, we analyse this evolution by placing our reflection at the intersection of two debates: one on the evolution of worker solidarity and the other on the place of service unionism in France. We will thus see that the direction given by the CFDT to its strike fund is indeed part of a service-oriented approach, but that it largely retains a protest-oriented purpose.