Program

Immigration, Ethnicity and Labour

October 22, 2022 from 10:45am EDT to 12:00pm EDT

Location: Room Y 318

 

Chair: Silke Neunsinger

Elizabeth Kirkland, “Bonus Allowed”: Immigration Agents and the position of Female Domestics in the SettlerColonial Project, 1880-1914. [online]

In 1903, Montreal-based Mrs. E.F. Francis launched a new career - she was to be paid $3 by the Canadian government for every woman or girl that she could place in a domestic service position in Canada. She herself gathered eligible candidates from Glasgow and Liverpool, promising each one a safe escort, a job, and a new life in Canada. She was just one agent among many involved in the migration of 17 thousands of women and girls crossing the Atlantic every year between 1880 and 1914 to take up positions in domestic service. This paper explores the ways this migration process was embedded in the settler-colonial project, sponsored by state governments and facilitated by various charitable and for-profit parties. It examines the insistence that labouring settlers should conform to specific codes of gender, class, race, age and sexuality.

Nicholas Fast “‘With a name like yours, you’re not going to go very far in a place like Burns and Company’: Race and Ethnicity in Winnipeg’s Packinghouses, 1920—1943.”

Nicholas Fast, “‘With a name like yours, you’re not going to go very far in a place like Burns and Company’: Race and Ethnicity in Winnipeg’s Packinghouses, 1920—1943.” How did race and ethnicity reinforce a perceived hierarchy of skill within Winnipeg’s meatpackers? The story of race, ethnicity, and perceived skill in Chicago’s packinghouses has been extensively written about by scholars such as Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, but the hierarchy within Winnipeg’s packinghouses followed different ethnic and racial groups, such as Ukrainian immigrants. This story encourages scholars to think about the way that ethnicity and race are used in different contexts to fulfill different labour needs, especially in the disassembly lines of North America’s packinghouses in the past and especially today.

Speakers / Panelists