Immigrants, ethnicity, and earnings in 1901: Revisiting Canada's vertical mosaic

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 83, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 196-229

  Sager, Eric W ^a   Morier, Christopher ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36549086464     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR.83.2.196     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. Jason Z. Lian and David Ralph Matthews, 'Does the Vertical Mosaic Still Exist? Ethnicity and Income in Canada, 1991,' Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 35, 4 (1998): 461-81
2. The formative role of Porter's work in Canadian sociology is the subject of Rick Helmes-Hayes and James Curtis, eds., The Vertical Mosaic Revisited (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998).
3. John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1965), 73
4. The literature includes, among many other works, Bernard R. Blishen 'Social Class and Opportunity in Canada,' Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 7 (1970): 110-27;
5. Gordon Darroch, 'Another Look at Ethnicity, Stratification and Social Mobility in Canada,' Canadian Journal of Sociology 4, 1 (1979): 1-24;
6. E.H. Lautard and D.J. Loree, 'Ethnic Stratification in Canada, 1931-1971,' Canadian Journal of Sociology 9 (1984): 333-43;
7. P.S. Li, Ethnic Inequality in a Class Society (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing 1988);
8. Peter C. Pineo and John Porter, 'Ethnic Origin and Occupational Attainment,' in M. Boyd et al., eds., Ascription and Achievement: Studies in Mobility and Status Attainment in Canada (Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1985): 357-92;
9. Michael D. Ornstein, 'The Occupational Mobility of Men in Ontario,' Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 18, 2 (1981): 181-225;
10. Lorne Tepperman, Social Mobility in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1975).
11. David E. Bloom, Gilles Grenier, and Morley Gunderson, 'The Changing Labor Market Position of Canadian Immigrants,' Canadian Journal of Economics 28 (1995): 987-1005;
12. Michael Baker and Dwayne Benjamin, 'Ethnicity, Foreign Birth and Earnings: A Canada/U.S. Comparison,' in Michael G. Abbott, Charles M. Beach, and Richard P. Chaykowski, eds., Transitions and Structural Change in the North American Labour Market (Kingston: IRC Press 1997): 281-313;
13. Michael Baker and Dwayne Benjamin, 'The Performance of Immigrants in the Canadian Labor Market,' Journal of Labor Economics 12 (1994): 369-405;
14. G.J. Borjas, 'Immigration Policy, National Origin and Immigrant Skills: A Comparison of Canada and the United States,' in D. Card and R. Freeman, eds., Small Differences That Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993), 21-43;
15. A. DeSilva, Earnings of Immigrants: A Comparative Analysis (Ottawa: Economic Council of Canada 1992);
16. and papers in Barry Chiswick, ed., Immigration, Language and Ethnicity: Canada and the United States (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute 1992)
17. Porter, Vertical Mosaic, 63;
18. H.C. Pentland, 'The Development of the Capitalistic Labour Market in Canada,' Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 25 (Nov. 1959): 450-61
19. Donald Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada's Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896-1994 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1995), 233.
20. See also Donald Avery, 'Dangerous Foreigners': European Immigrant Workers and Labour Radicalism in Canada, 1896-1932 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1979).
21. J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers within Our Gates; or. Coming Canadians (Toronto: F.C. Stephenson 1909);
22. Edmund Bradwin, The Bunkhouse Man: A Study of Work and Pay in the Camps of Canada, with an introduction by Jean Burnet (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972).
23. According to Bradwin, the 'whites' tended to congregate in 'the most remunerative part of railway construction,' whereas the 'foreigners' were those who 'stolidly engage in the mucking and heavier tasks.' Bradwin, The Bunkhouse Man, 92, 105
24. Alison Prentice et al., Canadian Women: A History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Harcourt Brace 1996), 112-13
25. Alvin Finkel and Margaret Conrad with Veronica Strong-Boag, History of the Canadian Peoples, 1867 to the Present (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman 1993), 270.
26. Compare J.L. Finlay and D.N. Sprague, The Structure of Canadian History, 5th ed. (Scarborough: Prentice Hall 1993), 287-8
27. Robert Harney and Harold Troper, Immigrants: A Portrait of the Urban Experience, 1890-1930 (Toronto: Van Nostrand Reinhold 1975), 53.They add that 'they [immigrants] did not fit [into the] North American class structure, only its stereotypes.'
28. Michael Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1975), 61-8
29. Lautard and Loree, 'Ethnic Stratification in Canada, 1931-1971,' 339
30. A. Gordon Darroch and Michael D. Ornstein, 'Ethnicity and Occupational Structure in Canada in 1871: The Vertical Mosaic in Historical Perspective,' Canadian Historical Review 61, 3 (1980): 305-33;
31. Gordon Darroch and Lee Soltow, Property and Inequality in Victorian Ontario: Structural Patterns and Cultural Communities in the 1871 Census (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991)
32. Darroch and Ornstein, 'Ethnicity and Occupational Structure in Canada in 1871,' 313-15, 322
33. citing S.D. Clark, 'The Post-Second World War Canadian Society,' Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 12 (1975): 25-32
34. For a discussion of parts of this census, see Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager, 'Finding the Workforce in the 1901 Census of Canada,' Histoire sociale/Social History 56 (Nov. 1995): 521-40;
35. Peter Baskerville and Eric W. Sager, Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), app. A, 195-216.
36. For introductions to the Canadian Families Project, see Eric W. Sager, 'The Canadian Families Project,' The History of the Family: An International Quarterly 3, 1 (1998): 117-23,
37. and the project's special issue of Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 33, 4 (2000). The project's national sample of the 1901 census is a 5 per cent random sample of dwellings from each of 129 microfilm reels. All individual-level and property information for all persons in each sampled dwelling (information from both Schedules 1 and 2) was entered. The sample contains 50, 943 dwellings and 265, 287 individuals.
38. Alan Gree and Mary Mackinnon, 'The Slow Assimilation of British Immigrants in Canada: Evidence from Montreal and Toronto, 1901,' Explorations in Economic History 38 (2001): 315-38.
39. Much of Porter's rich analysis related to elites and political power, subjects that are not of direct concern to us here. See Michael Ornstein, 'Three Decades of Elite Research in Canada: John Porter's Unfulfilled Legacy,' in Helmes-Hayes and Curtis, The Vertical Mosaic Revisited, 145-79.
40. For further discussion of the sample, see the papers in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History (fall 2000).
41. For instance, Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1964), 90ff;
42. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West, chap. 2;
43. Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1982), 161ff.
44. See the discussion in Gérard Bouchard, Tous les métiers du monde: Le traitement des données professionelles en histoire sociale (Quebec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval 1996), 33-42.
45. The census undeneports women's work and it may also underreport their wage-paid labour force participation. Nevertheless, Peter Baskerville has discovered that, for women who were in the measured labour force, the proportion who were self-employed ('working on own account') was higher than in late-twentieth-century Canada. Women were particularly overrepresented in the employee-service occupations category and the self-employed service category. Baskerville, 'Gender, Family and Self-Employment in Urban Canada: 1901 and 1906 Compared' (unpublished paper presented to the American Historical Association, Chicago, January 2000)
46. Timothy J. Hatton, 'The Immigrant Assimilation Puzzle in Late Nineteenth-Century America,' Journal of Economic History 57, 1 (1997): 34-62.
47. See also Chris Minns, 'Income Cohort Effects and Occupational Mobility: A New Look at Immigration to the United States at the Turn of the 20th Century,' Explorations in Economic History 37 (2000): 326-50. Christopher Hanes found that the '"old immigrants" ofthe late 19th century experienced slower growth in wages and occupational status than native-born workers, in contrast to the late 20th century pattern of relatively rapid wage growth for most immigrants.'
48. Hanes, 'Immigrants' Relative Rate of Wage Growth in the Late 19th Century,' Explorations in Economic History 33 (1996): 60.
49. See also Barry Eichengreen and Henry A. Gemery, The Earnings of Skilled and Unskilled Immigrants at the End of the Nineteenth Century,' Journal of Economic History 46, 2 (1986): 441-54;
50. Joseph P. Ferrie, 'The Entry into the U.S. Labor Market of Antebellum European Immigrants, 1840-1860,' Explorations in Economic History 34 (1997): 295-330;
51. Barry R. Chiswick, 'Jewish Immigrant Wages in 1909: An Analysis of the Dillingham Commission Data,' Explorations in Economic History 29 (1992): 274-89.
52. On the use of Lowess curves, see Livio Di Matteo, 'Wealth Accumulation and the Life-Cycle in Economic History: Implications of Alternative Approaches to Data,' Explorations in Economic History 35 (1998): 296-324.
53. Hatton, 'The Immigrant Assimilation Puzzle,' 52
54. Marvin McInnis, 'Immigration and Emigration: Canada in the Late Nineteenth Century,' in Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ed., Migration and the International Labor Market, 1850-1939 (London and New York: Routledge 1994), 139-55
55. We know that movement was extensive: see, for instance, Bruno Ramirez, On the Move: French-Canadian and Italian Migrants in the North Atlantic Economy, 1860-1914 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1991).
56. Green and Mackinnon, 'The Slow Assimilation of British Immigrants,' 335
57. Hanes discusses cohort effects in the United States: Hanes, 'Immigrants' Relative Rate of Wage Growth,' 38.
58. See also Minns, 'Income, Cohort Effects, and Occupational Mobility: A New Look at Immigration to the United States at the Turn of the 20th Century,' Explorations in Economic History 37 (2000): 326-50
59. On this managerial supervisory elite, see also Baskerville and Sager, Unwilling Idlers, 88-96.
60. On the importing of skilled workers from Britain and the United States, see also Craig Heron, 'Factory Workers,' in Paul Craven, ed., Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995), 512;
61. Joy Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990), 17ff.
62. Lian and Matthews, 'Does the Vertical Mosaic Still Exist?' 475-6
63. In cities of 100,000 and more 15.6 per cent of French Canadians were general labourers; in rural areas 32.4 percent were general labourers. This is consistent with what Darroch and Ornstein found in 1871: Darroch and Ornstein, 'Ethnicity and Occupational Structure,' 323-4.
64. Compare Ramirez, On the Move, 92, 148-9.
65. Alan G. Green and David A. Green analyzed the manifests of ships landing at Halifax and other sources and concluded that 'immigrants matched their skills to demand in Canada as part of a labor market in which demand stretched back across the Atlantic (or at least to the ships that carried them to Canada).' Green and Green, 'Balanced Growth and the Geographical Distribution of European Immigrant Arrivals to Canada, 1900-1912,' Explorations in Economic History 30 (1993): 57