Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union
| Full name | Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1919 |
| Date dissolved | 1930s |
| Country | South Africa |
The Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU) was a trade union and mass based popular political movement in southern Africa. It was influenced by the syndicalist politics of the Industrial Workers of the World (adopting the IWW Preamble in 1925), as well as by Garveyism, Christianity, and liberalism.
The original ICU was founded in Cape Town in 1919. Later that year it held a famous joint strike on the docks with the syndicalist Industrial Workers of Africa, a black-based union modelled on the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World. In 1920 the two unions merged with a number of other emergent black and Coloured-based unions into an expanded ICU with the stated aim of "creating one great union" of workers south of the Zambezi river i.e. spanning Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The first journal of the ICWU, Black Man, ran for six issues in 1920.
The ICU has been described as "one of the most radical movements ever seen in Southern Africa." Visiting American and Caribbean sailors played a key role in the introduction of both Garveyite and syndicalist ideas. The ICU remained active in Zimbabwe into the 1950s as the Reformed Industrial Commercial Union (RICU), but had declined elsewhere by the end of the 1930s.
The ICU spread into Namibia in 1920, Zimbabwe in 1927, and Zambia in 1931. For its early years, however, South Africa was its stronghold.
The South African ICU was a general union, with a loose structure. Its operations were largely based in black urban communities and on farms, and its social base was a mixture of workers, sharecroppers and other tenant farmers, and the downwardly mobile black middle class. The ICU experienced explosive rural growth, so that by 1927 it could boast a membership of 100,000, making it one of the largest trade unions ever to have taken root in Africa before the 1970s. No movement before or since has succeeded in mobilising the South African rural poor on such a scale. While its base was increasingly rural, it also managed to make inroads into urban black communities, notably in Durban on a large scale.
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