From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Haitians/Daniel Gay
Between 1968 and 1973, professionals tended to be well represented among Haitian immigrants: teachers, doctors, priests, nurses, agronomists. This was true of women (between 1953 and 1968, virtually all professional Haitian immigrant women were nurses) as well as men. These skilled immigrants took advantage of the opportunities offered by Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and a rapidly expanding economy. Starting in the 1980s, immigrants in these categories have tended to be drawn to business or public administration.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, working-class immigrants represented a minority of Haitians coming to Canada: 7.7 percent in 1968 and 36 percent in 1973. Some were manual workers or labourers with little or no education or training who did manufacturing or repair work, especially in the textile sector. Others worked in the service sector – waiters, chambermaids, maintenance workers, parking attendants, taxi drivers, mechanics, and the like – or as domestics.
Non-specialized and semi-specialized workers constituted a majority of Haitian immigrants from 1974 on. Most of them worked in non-unionized small and middle-sized companies, and 53 percent of them had incomes that barely reached $8,000 a year. Many worked in underpaid jobs in the underground economy, with no collective agreements to guarantee their security. Before 1980, undeclared workers without work permits were sometimes paid as little as $100, $50, or even $25 a month.
Among Haitian immigrant workers, 50 percent are women, a large majority of whom are in working-class positions. Thus, while women represent 20 percent of employees at the executive and administrative levels, they account for 76 percent of service workers, 52 percent of manufacturing, assembly, and repair workers, and 41 percent of those in unclassified jobs. A significant number of women, like many men, work in office and sales jobs, and a large proportion of women work as domestics.
There is no Haitian big business class in Canada. However, many small businesses have developed, especially since 1987: restaurants, outlets for Haitian products, travel agencies, insurance brokers, printers, clothing stores, bookstores, music stores, and others. Montreal now has businesses with names like Le Café Combite, Le Marché Antillais Impex, Le Songe Tropical, Le Barrage Ecclésiastique, and Le Service Cargo Caraïbe. The Caisse d’Économie des Haïtiens was established in 1981 as an outlet for the savings of Canadians of Haitian origin. A directory of Haitian businesses in Montreal, Boston, New York, and Miami, La Liberté, has been published since 1986. In the 1991 edition of the directory, 45 percent of the businesses listed operated in Montreal. Also, the 1993–94 edition of the Directory of Black Business Persons and Professionals, published in Montreal, lists many Haitian businesses.
These businesses have not only enlivened retail trade in Quebec but have also created jobs for Canadians of all origins. Haitian immigration has also contributed to meeting the demand for skilled workers in Quebec. The young, skilled teachers and technicians who came during the first wave of Haitian immigration between 1968 and 1973 were absorbed into the Quebec public sector, with its orientation towards socio-economic development, Quebec’s openness to the world, sectoral planning, the expansion of health services, administrative reform, and the extension of education. Labour-intensive manufacturing and service industries were helped considerably in filling their need for workers by the second wave of Haitian immigration that began in 1974.
However, integration into the work world turned out to be difficult for some categories of immigrants in some periods, and traumatic or nearly impossible for others. After the job market became tighter in the early 1970s, the Quebec Department of Education no longer issued teaching certificates to new immigrants, and professional associations in fields such as agronomy, medicine, and pharmacy made it difficult for practitioners from foreign countries to obtain work. Some positions and research grants at the federal level were closed or refused to people who were not yet Canadian citizens, even if they were legal residents of Canada, and some people who had jobs were threatened with being fired if they did not become citizens. Specialized workers were able to survive only by accepting low wages and living in decrepit housing.
These practices, which have been documented by recent research undertaken for the Quebec Department of Immigration and Cultural Communities, virtually amounted to institutional exclusion. They left some groups of black Canadians, including Haitians, seriously disadvantaged in the labour market. These groups have suffered from a high rate of unemployment: up to 30 percent, for example, in Montreal North. In the Park Extension neighbourhood of north-central Montreal, where young Haitians and young Jamaicans live side by side, 49 percent of black families live below the poverty line. In addition, as a result of their economic disadvantages, Haitians tended to be apathetic towards successive Quebec government policies directed towards cultural communities in the late 1970s and 1980s, whether these policies were based on cultural convergence, on building a “Quebec for Québécois,” or on creating a Quebec for “Quebeckers of all origins.”
Juvenile delinquency is a problem linked to poverty as well as to a failure to stay in school, rootlessness, promiscuity, and a high proportion of single-parent families – 60 percent in some working-class Montreal neighbourhoods. Between 1982 and 1985, this problem began to emerge in the form of gangs, especially among fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys. Starting with crimes against property, gang activity escalated from 1985 on to include attacks against people. Some gang activities appear to have class implications. Thus, violent confrontations, in which groups of young Quebeckers of Haitian, Jamaican, or Asian origin, together or separately, have fought for possession and control of decrepit dwellings, can be seen as a kind of struggle for survival.
