Labour

The ethnic background of immigrant labour in Canada has changed dramatically since Confederation. From 1867 until 1970, the overwhelming majority of newcomers were of British or European background. In contrast, by the 1990s three of the five largest groups were non-European: those from Hong Kong represented 14 percent of the total, India 6.4, and the Philippines 5.1. Moreover, although the majority of Canada’s immigrant population were born in Europe, the percentage from this region declined from 62 percent in 1986 to 54 percent in 1991, while those from Asia increased from 18 to 25 percent during the same five-year period. Despite the change in ethnic composition, the proportion of the population of immigrant background has remained relatively constant since 1951, when 16 per cent of Canadians were born outside the country. Most immigrants (94 percent) now live in the provinces of Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and Alberta, with over half (57 percent) located in the three largest metropolitan areas – Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.

Canada, like the United States, has offered newcomers its own version of economic opportunity, its own mechanism of inclusion, and its own political and institutional framework. To ask how immigrants confronted this multidimensional reality in the pursuit of their life prospects means addressing one of the most fundamental issues of Canadian industrialization and immigration: the particular ways in which ethnic and class dynamics have interacted and the structural, as well as cultural, conditions which informed that interaction.

Immigrant workers, as H.C. Pentland has outlined, have been an integral factor in the Canadian capitalistic labour market, and they have traditionally been prepared to seek employment in the low-paying, exacting jobs associated with labour-intensive industries. Many of these workers have also found themselves in a split labour market where employers attempted to replace the Canadian-born with “cheap” workers from minorities or where, in some instances, employers and skilled workers cooperated to maintain a stratified occupational structure. But the dominant trend has been working-class cooperation rather than competition, especially after 1914, when labour unions and socialist parties increasingly tried to mobilize all white workers against exploitive corporate capitalism. A more inclusive and non-racist strategy would, however, not emerge until after the World War II.

What is labour? Does the definition include both the unskilled and the skilled, blue-collar workers and professionals, the unionized and the non-unionized? Equally perplexing is the definition of immigrant labour. Where, for instance, does one place independent immigrants, sponsored immigrants, and refugees? And what about entrepreneurs? For the purposes of this entry, labour will include those engaged in wage employment, both skilled and unskilled, unionized and non-unionized, and it will cover all groups of immigrants. But because of the complexity of the subject and the range of the historical coverage, the essay will deal primarily with unskilled immigrant workers – those who have taken the jobs that “Canadians don’t want to do.”

The focus here is not on a specific ethnic group; rather, the entry’s purpose is to provide a synthesis of the experiences of many different groups of immigrant workers in Canada during the twentieth century. While it recognizes important differences in cultural and occupational backgrounds, the emphasis here is on common trends. These include reasons for emigration, occupational placement, and economic exploitation, as well as social and political discrimination. In relation to this topic a number of questions are posed. How did immigrant workers respond to the promise of economic opportunities on the frontier and in cities prior to the World War II? Did they passively accept their inferior status within the Canadian industrial system? Did they act, as some scholars have suggested, as an impediment to the development of militant unionism and socialism in this country? Or were they, as other authors have emphasized, a positive force within the expanding Canadian labour movement because of their willingness to challenge the authority of industrial capitalists and the state?

After 1945 another set of questions emerges. What role did European displaced persons assume in the country’s labour force? In what ways did immigrant workers from Europe and the Caribbean provide cheap labour for Canada’s expanding economy between 1950 and 1990? What were the special problems that immigrant women workers encountered? And what are the most important contemporary issues surrounding the recruitment and admission of immigrant labour?