At a Glance
From Kopyl to Cape Town: The Immigrant Organiser
Rachael Alexandrowich arrived in South Africa in 1929 from the shtetl world of Eastern European Jewish life — from the world of Kopyl in what was then the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement, the region where Jews had been confined for centuries and where the political traditions of the Jewish working class had developed in response to the specific conditions of discrimination and poverty that confined existence produced. The traditions she brought with her — socialist, communist, trade unionist — were the traditions of her community of origin, translated from the Pale of Settlement to the Western Cape of the late 1920s.
She was fifteen years old when she arrived and joined the Communist Party almost immediately. The speed of her political commitment reflected both the political formation she had received in the Jewish immigrant milieu of her Cape Town destination and her own rapid understanding of what South African society was. The racial hierarchy of South African capitalism was not a subtle or deniable thing; it expressed itself in the composition of the labour market, in the conditions of the workplaces, in the spatial organisation of the city, and in the daily interactions of a society built on racial categorisation. For someone with Ray Alexander's political background, understanding what she was seeing and deciding to organise against it was almost simultaneous.
The Cape Town she arrived in was different from the Johannesburg that was the centre of the SACP's activities — it was a city with a large Coloured population, with a specific labour history in the fruit and canning industries, and with the particular racial dynamics of a society that had developed different patterns of racial interaction from those of the Witwatersrand mining economy. The Food and Canning Workers Union that she would build was a product of this specific environment — of the women workers in the canning factories of the Western Cape, of the non-racial organising possibilities that the Cape's particular history made somewhat less impossible than they were elsewhere in the country.
The FCWU: Building South Africa's First Non-Racial Industrial Union
The Food and Canning Workers Union was Ray Alexander's principal contribution to the South African labour movement — the organisation she founded, built, and led through its most formative years, and that represented a practical demonstration of what non-racial industrial unionism could look like in a country whose entire institutional architecture was built to prevent it.
The canning industry of the Western Cape employed women workers of multiple racial groups — African women, Coloured women, and in some positions white women — under conditions that reproduced the racial hierarchy of the broader society within the workplace. African women received the lowest wages, were confined to the heaviest and least skilled work, and had the fewest protections. Coloured women occupied an intermediate position. White women, where they worked in the factories at all, were in supervisory or semi-skilled roles. The industry's wage structure and job classification system was racial capitalism expressed in its most immediate form — the allocation of economic reward according to racial category rather than according to skill or effort or the value of the work produced.
Organising these workers together — across the racial divide that the employers used to prevent solidarity and that the state used to prevent collective action — required both an ideological commitment to non-racialism and a practical organising skill that could build trust across the racial divisions that apartheid had made real in people's daily lives. Ray Alexander brought both. The FCWU she built was not simply a union with non-racial rhetoric; it was a union with non-racial practices — collective bargaining that treated all its members as having the same interests and the same rights, regardless of their racial classification, and a union culture that expressed in daily organisational life the non-racial society the Communist Party and the Congress Alliance claimed to be working toward.
The Women Workers of the Western Cape
The specific constituency that the FCWU organised — women workers in the food and canning industry — gave Ray Alexander's organising a particular character that distinguished it from the predominantly male-oriented organising of most of the South African labour movement's other traditions. The women workers she organised were, in the hierarchy of South African society, among the most marginalised people in the country: Black women in the lowest-paid and least secure jobs, subject to the racial hierarchy of the workplace and the gender hierarchy of both the apartheid system and the family structures it distorted.
Organising these women required going to where they were — to the factory floors, to the communities they lived in, to the informal networks of mutual support that sustained women's social life in the townships and the Coloured communities of the Western Cape. It required speaking to them in their own languages and from their own experience, building the kind of trust that came not from abstract political argument but from the demonstrated commitment to their specific conditions and their specific needs. This was the patient, concrete organising work that Ray Alexander was exceptionally good at — the work of building relationships one by one and institution by institution, of developing the local leaders who could sustain the union in the communities where its members lived, of creating an organisational culture that people felt was theirs rather than something imposed on them from outside.
The FCWU became a model for non-racial industrial unionism in South Africa — a practical demonstration that the thing the apartheid state claimed was impossible was not only possible but effective. Other unions studied its structure and its methods. The independent trade union movement that grew in the 1970s and 1980s and eventually produced COSATU drew on the organisational tradition that the FCWU and other non-racial unions of the earlier period had developed. Ray Alexander's contribution to this tradition was foundational.
The Banning and Its Consequences
The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 listed Ray Alexander as a communist and imposed on her the restrictions that listing entailed. The banning was particularly devastating because it was directed specifically at her capacity to do trade union work — the restrictions prohibited her from attending union meetings, from serving as a union officer, from visiting union premises, and from communicating with other listed persons. The government understood that her effectiveness in the labour movement rested on her ability to participate in it directly, and the banning was designed to prevent exactly that participation.
She was not entirely silenced — the networks she had built, the people she had trained, the organisational culture she had developed continued to function — but the direct engagement that had been the substance of her contribution was severely limited. The years under the banning orders were years in which she had to find indirect ways to maintain her connection to the movement, to contribute through the relationships and the institutions that could sustain her influence even when her formal participation was legally prevented.
The banning also reflected the apartheid government's recognition of her effectiveness. The restrictions were targeted at people the state identified as genuinely dangerous to its order — people whose capacity to organise, to build solidarity, to demonstrate in practice that the racial hierarchy the state maintained was both unjust and avoidable, made them threats worth the political and administrative costs of formal restriction. Being banned was, in the liberation movement's experience, a kind of back-handed acknowledgment of impact.
Class and Colour: The Book That Documented a World
The collaboration between Ray Alexander and Jack Simons that produced Class and Colour in South Africa 1850–1950 was one of the most important intellectual partnerships in the history of South African scholarship. The book they wrote together — published in 1969 under the Penguin African Library imprint — traced the development of the South African working class from the mid-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, examining how racial classification had been used to create and maintain a divided working class in which one fraction received the wages, the legal protections, and the political recognition of full citizenship while another was confined to low-wage labour and political exclusion.
The book's authority came from the combination of scholarly research that Jack brought and practical organising knowledge that Ray brought. She had been inside the canning factories of the Western Cape; she had organised the women workers who were the subjects of the chapters on the food and canning industry; she understood from her own experience what the racial hierarchy of the South African labour market looked like from the inside rather than from the archive. This experiential knowledge shaped the book's analysis in ways that purely scholarly research could not have produced, and it gave the account a concreteness and a human texture that distinguished it from more theoretical treatments of the same material.
The book has remained in print for more than fifty years and remains one of the most important works on South African social history available. Its argument — that the racial structure of the South African economy was constructed rather than natural, designed to serve specific interests rather than reflecting inherent differences between racial groups — is now widely accepted as historical scholarship. When Ray and Jack Simons made it in 1969, it was a genuinely contestable and politically significant claim.
Legacy: The Organiser Who Built the Foundation
Ray Alexander Simons died in Cape Town in 2004, at the age of ninety. She had spent nearly seventy years in South Africa, and the labour movement she had helped build — particularly the tradition of non-racial industrial unionism that the FCWU embodied and that the independent trade unions of the 1970s and 1980s and COSATU developed further — was one of the most important institutional inheritances of the democratic South Africa she had helped to create.
Her legacy is threefold. The FCWU, which she founded and built into a model of non-racial unionism: the practical demonstration that workers across racial lines could organise together, could build collective power together, and could challenge the racial capitalism that the apartheid system maintained. Class and Colour in South Africa, co-authored with Jack: the foundational scholarly account of the racial working class's formation and the theoretical framework through which the liberation movement's most sophisticated thinkers understood what they were fighting against. And the tradition of patient, concrete, community-grounded organising that she embodied and that she passed on to the generations of labour movement activists who learned from her — directly in the factories and union halls of the Western Cape, and indirectly through the organisational culture she helped create.
She was an immigrant who gave South Africa more than it gave her in material terms, and she gave it with the full commitment of a person who had chosen the country and its liberation as completely as any person born to it. The democratic South Africa that the transition produced was, in its non-racial character and in the labour rights embedded in its constitution, in part her creation. That is a large legacy for a fifteen-year-old from Kopyl who arrived in Cape Town in 1929 and immediately went to work.