After the establishment of the fascist Estado Novo regime, the CGT attempted to resist the creation of a corporatist economy and led a general strike against it, but this too was suppressed.
[7] Following the end of the war and the subsequent defeat of the UON's general strike in November 1918, the labour movement felt the need to reorganise itself for the purposes of taking power.
[9] In September 1919, a second national workers' congress was held in Coimbra, where the UON was reorganised into the General Confederation of Labour (Portuguese: Confederação Geral do Trabalho; CGT).
[17] After the delegates of the Berlin conference endorsed the establishment of a new international, in October 1922, the CGT convened a national congress to discuss the issue, with 55 local unions supporting the proposal and 22 favouring affiliating with the RILU.
[21] Historians Bernhard H. Bayerlein and Marcel van der Linden attributed the declining membership to the fact that the CGT largely organised skilled workers and artisans, while neglecting lower-class labourers.
[21] They noted four key factors that affected the CGT during the early 1920s: their membership was largely concentrated in the large industrial cities of Lisbon, Porto and Covilhã; their actions were spontaneous and short-lived, often dispersing without achieving long-term improvements; a hierarchy emerged between skilled and unskilled workers; and state repression increased, while business owners concentrated into employers' organisations.
[21] Facing a sustained decline in its membership numbers, in 1922, the CGT held a third national workers congress in Covilha, where it made the decision to restructure itself.
[23] The CGT continued to lead strike actions over the following years, and in February 1925, it organised the largest political demonstration in the history of Portugal, with over 100,000 workers participating.
The nascent Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), which had been established by a coalition of anarchists, syndicalists and left-wing socialists, initially called on its members to organise within the CGT.
[28] The CGT's newspaper A Batalha was soon shut down; its sailors', dockworkers' and construction workers' unions were forcibly dissolved; and 600 of its members were exiled to the colonies of the Portuguese Empire.
[26] With many of its autonomous unions going underground, the CGT attempted to reorganise itself as an illegal organisation, holding secret meetings and covertly distributing its publications.
[34] Spanish and Portuguese anarcho-syndicalists attempted to continue organising clandestinely, but Salazar's dictatorship limited the CGT's scope of action, causing it to wither away.
[36] Reliable figures on the CGT's membership during its period of clandestinity were never provided by the organisation itself, although its administrative accountant Gil Gonçalves estimated it to have still had 15,000 members by the establishment of the Estado Novo in 1933.
[36] The CGT sought to unite all Portuguese workers into autonomous, federally-linked unions, themselves established to defend and improve living and working conditions.
It declared itself to be independent of all political parties and religious institutions, and proclaimed its ultimate goal to be the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers' control over the means of production.