Jamaican Labor Migration by Elizabeth McLean Petras

Author:Elizabeth McLean Petras [Petras, Elizabeth McLean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Political Science
ISBN: 9780429712999
Google: w3akDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-04-11T03:00:35+00:00

Global Labor: When “Citizenship” No Longer Defines “Labor”

Failed negotiations between the two states certainly did not stop the movement of Jamaicans to work on the United States canal. Instead, it forced them into extralegal channels whereby they emigrated on their own account or through the offices of “secret agents” who continued to operate in Jamaica outside the legal restrictions imposed by the Emigration Law.

That most of the hand labor on the United States canal was done by black workers imported from the West Indian islands is certain, but estimates as to the proportions coming from each island are totally unreliable. With legal restrictions on recruitment from Jamaica, the canal commission would not have risked potential conflict with Britain by publicly disclosing how many workers of Jamaican origin it actually employed on the project. Jamaicans, rather than working on the payroll of the Isthmian Commission, may also have taken employment in a variety of non-Commission jobs that were, nonetheless, related to canal construction. Nor is it possible to assume that all those whose nationality was listed as Barbadian were actually citizens of Barbados. Barbados was a central location for steamships carrying workers to the zone, and many who traveled from the smaller islands did so via the Barbadian port stop. For the purposes of record, then, their place of origin was classified simply as Barbados, although in fact their actual citizenship may have been one of the several Windward or Leeward islands.

On the other hand, many accounts of the day, including those found in semiofficial documents such as the Canal Record or reports prepared by commission officials, referred to the general category of all West Indian workers as Jamaican. This was carried over from the French and railway projects, when men of Jamaican citizenship formed the majority of the imported working class. Estimates and records show that before 1904 the movement from Barbados and the smaller islands was insignificant. At a minimum, Jamaicans accounted for 25 percent and perhaps closer to 50 percent of the foreign labor force between 1904 and 1914. Some were workers or their offspring who had emigrated to the isthmus earlier and remained; others came independently, generally not declaring emigration to be the intent of their travel; and some were brought by covert recruiters or small private agents not associated with the commission.

References are made to the number of Jamaicans employed in various departments of the commission. For example, the Annual Report of the Canal Commission for 1905 breaks down the 1,216 men employed in the bureau of machinery and equipment as follows: 296 of these were artisans, foremen, and clerks, and the balance were Jamaican and native laborers or Americans on silver rolls (U.S. Congress. 59th Cong., 1st sess. S. Doc. 127, 1906:129). Harry Franck, a journalist who served as a census-taker in his capacity as a Canal Zone policeman, claimed, “Four thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven Zone residents had I enrolled during those six weeks. Something over half of these were Jamaicans” (Franck 1913:129). In

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