Jamaicans have been leaving home for a long
time-for so long, in fact, and in such great
numbers that today more than half of the
world’s 4.4 million Jamaicans live outside the
island.
Their exodus began almost as soon as their
slavery ended in 1838. A few set sail for distant
ports in the 1850s and 60s and, starting in the
1880s, thousands more crossed the Caribbean
Sea to Central America where they cultivated
bananas on United Fruit’s plantations, built
Costa Rica’s railways and dug the Panama
Canal. When canal construction ended in 1914
and crop disease forced production cutbacks on
the plantations, migrants streamed into Cuban
canefields and the northern industrial centers of
the United States. Only worldwide depression
put a halt to their movement. 1 In the 40 years
NACLA ReportJanlFeb 1981
between 1881 and 1921, emigration had carried
off 156,000 Jamaicans, 35% of the period’s
total population increase.
Yet even the largest of these early migrations
pale in comparison to the massive movement
4
a
– If
3
Y
z
A IANACLA Report
During those years, the movement to Britain
overshadowed all others. Permitted unre-
stricted entry to their “mother country,” colon-
ial West Indians rushed to fill the manifold jobs
created by postwar recovery.
In Jamaica, workers poured out of every par-
ish (the equivalent of states) into boats and
planes bound for Britain. Among them were
skilled and unskilled wage laborers, self-em-
ployed artisans and tradesmen, and small and
medium landholders. In the decade from 1953
to 1962, Britain absorbed 163,000 Jamai-
cans-more than half of whom made their
move in the two and a half years just before con-
trols were to be imposed.
White animosity in England toward the bur-
geoning black population had forced passage of
the restrictive Commonwealth Immigrants Act,
which went into effect in July 1962. As first un-
skilled workers and, later even those with special
qualifications were refused work vouchers,
West Indian labor migration to Britain plum-
meted.
In 1965, just as the Crown closed its doors to
all but family dependents, the U.S. Congress
lifted its nearly complete 1952 ban on West In-
dian immigration. In the first eight years after
the 100-person quota was dropped, more than
110,000 Jamaicans took up legal residence in
the United States, an increase of 715%. Still,
access to the “streets of gold” was far more re-
stricted than it had earlier been to Britain.
Total immigration from the Western Hemis-
phere was subject to a strict annual ceiling of
120,000. Moreover, to exclude “unnecessary”
workers, labor certification was “required of all
immigrants entering the labor market, except
for parents, children under 21, or spouses of
citizens or permanent resident aliens.” This hit
hardest at the unskilled (with the notable excep-
tion, in the case of Jamaica, of private
household workers). 2 By 1974, an estimated
300,000 Jamaicans were living in the United
States as “overstays.”*
In 1967, Canada also eased controls, revamp-
ing legislation that had limited entry to domes-
tics and farmworkers. Although the flow re-
mained considerably smaller than that to the
* Between 1963 and 1976, 148,028 Jamaicans were
recruited, under Section H-2 of the Immigration and Na-
tionality Act, for temporary farmwork in the U.S. One
estimate placed the number of contract laborers going
“AWOL” at approximately 100 per month. See NACLA,
vol. XI, no. 7, Nov-Dec 1977.
United States, the number ofJamaicans migrat-
ing to Canada in 1970-74 surpassed total immi-
gration for the entire preceding decade (ap-
proximately 22,000).
A GYPSY PEOPLE?
Jamaicans not infrequently comment to the
curious outsider that they “are a gypsy people,”
explaining their postwar flights by a seemingly
natural penchant for movement. And indeed,
the implied fascination with travel abroad ap-
pears confirmed by Jamaica’s language of mi-
gration: one doesn’t move to this or that coun-
try; rather, one “goes foreign.”
But Jamaica’s massive population move-
ments are not unique. The island’s experience
parallels that of underdeveloped countries
throughout Latin America and the Caribbean,
as well as many other parts of the third world.
Systematic labor emigration to the advanced
capitalist countries has been an integral aspect
of their postwar history.
In recent years, receiving countries like the
United States have turned their attention to the
“alarming problem” of their new immigrant
labor force. In lieu of any serious inquiry into
the causes of migration, a convenient explana-
tion is simply borrowed from stale conceptions
of underdevelopment. In a typical portrayal,
the predominant traditional economic sectors,
like agriculture, allegedly isolated from modern
capitalist development, are unable to support
the country’s too rapidly increasing population.
The modern industrial and service sectors, their
apologists explain, remain too stunted by small
internal markets to absorb the surplus laborers,
in the main affording only tenuous employment
and low wages to their own small labor force.
Among the migrants, it is therefore argued, are
those from the modern sector attracted by the
higher wages of developed countries, as well as
the urban unemployed and those condemned to
underemployment and poverty in traditional
occupations. In other words, at the root of the
massive labor emigrations from “poor” coun-
tries is the problem of too little capitalism, i.e.,
the failure of those countries to sufficiently inte-
grate their economies into the dynamic and ex-
panding international capitalist economy.
In fact, it is not the lack of capitalist develop-
ment, but its vast expansion in underdeveloped
countries, that has prepared the ground for the
movement of labor to the developed countries.
4JanlFeb 1981
In the postwar period, third world governments
bent on modernization and transnational
corporations bent on increased profits
spearheaded the rapid spread of capitalist pro-
duction and marketing into the countryside and
the creation of urban industrial centers.
Agriculture, that “traditional” stronghold, was
the site of extensive direct investment in produc-
tion for the world market by transnational and
domestic companies, and of state-sponsored
reforms to facilitate that process.
In the pre-capitalist class relations of the tra-
ditional economy, the producers (peasants,
artisans, etc.) have some control over their
means of production (lands, workshops and
tools). But this conflicts sharply with the de-
mands of capital accumulation. To attain
maximum profits, and thus to expand, cap-
italists must be able to control the amount and
intensity of work and to impose new competitive
production techniques. In short, they must con-
trol the means and process of production.
The resulting struggles, manifested differ-
ently in each country, but integral to capitalist
development in all, fundamentally change the
class structure and conditions of livelihood of
what had been the traditional labor force.
Although these changes do not, by themselves,
explain specific labor migrations to New York
or London or Toronto, they do tend to impel
these varied movements in search of work.
CAPITALIST OVERHAUL IN JAMAICA
At the start of decolonization in 1944- Bri-
tain’s response to Jamaican rebellion in the
1930s -Crown Colony rule gave way to internal
representative self-government; independence
would follow in 1962. Along with Westminster
parliamentary democracy, the Crown be-
queathed to the local ruling class other, less
celebrated, colonial legacies. The so-called
“surplus labor problem,” for instance, had al-
ready reached crisis proportions as a result of
colonial agricultural policies; by the early 40s a
quarter of all workers were unemployed and
nearly half were underemployed.
Initially, there was considerable doubt in rul-
ing circles that rapid industrialization could re-
solve the crisis. Nevertheless, the new govern-
ment took its cue from the local merchants and
capitalist farmers who stood to gain from state
support of private industry. It soon imple-
mented its own brand of “Bootstrap,” the
Z
Kaiser Aluminum’s open-pit bauxite mine hear Discovery
Bay.
much-touted development program underway
in Puerto Rico.3
The kingpin of Jamaica’s strategy for cap-
italist development, like that of its Latin neigh-
bor, was the transnational corporation. The
presumed insufficiency of local capital and
“know-how” prompted passage of incentive leg-
islation to lure foreign capital to the tropics.
The courting technique could already be glean-
ed from the Hotel Aid Law of 1944 (aimed at an
industry whose earliest expression was United
Fruit banana boats doubling as cruise ships
around the end of the century). The package of
reduced tax liability on capital investment and
duty-free entry of critical imported inputs reap-
peared in subsequent legislation concerned with
mining (the 1950 Bauxite and Alumina Indus-
tries Law) and manufacturing (the Pioneer In-
dustries Law of 1949, and the Industrial Incen-
tives Law and Export Industries Law of 1956).
The government also guaranteed infra-
structural support for industrial expansion and,
perhaps most seductive of all, permitted the
unlimited remittance of profits to corporate
headquarters in Europe and North America. 4
Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth,
foreign capital flocked to the island. It moved
into tourism, into the manufacture of import-
5NACLA Report
substitutes and exports and, above all, into
bauxite. Investment by six North American
aluminum companies mining the Jamaican
ore–Alcoa, Alcan (based in Montreal), Rey-
nolds, Kaiser, Anaconda and Revere–ac-
counted for nearly three-quarters of the one bil-
lion dollars in direct U.S. investment over the
period 1950-72.5
The flood of foreign investment provoked the
entry of local capital into certain auxiliary
activities. “Plants had to be built, new roads
cut, railways laid and housing constructed for
the bauxite employees. Cement and clay
manufacturing boomed.” 6 Albeit small and
dependent on outside investment decisions, an
industrial bougeoisie emerged. Its core was the
same handful of merchant families that had
dominated the distributive trade-all of
English, Jewish, Syrian or Chinese descent in a
country whose population is 90% black.
Unattended by the fanfare that greeted these
new industries, agribusiness, too, got off to a
running postwar start as sugar production
climbed to all-time heights. At the helm of
expansion was Britain’s Tate & Lyle, whose ex-
tensive investment in canefield and sugar fac-
tory operations signalled similar efforts on
locally-owned estates (field and factory com-
bines) and large farms. Like most large in-
dividual growers and agricultural firms, Tate &
Lyle diversified into livestock production. The
aluminum companies, too, put their huge land
reserves to use in a variety of capital-intensive
agricultural projects. Agricultural develop-
ment strategy, however, not only called for
direct productive investment by capital; exten-
sive state credits and subsidies were often
employed to woo peasants as well to produce for
the world market.
MOVING FACES, CHANGING PLACES
Jamaica’s rapidly changing economic pro-
file- courtesy of the transnationals-was mir-
rored in the new look of the island’s labor force.
Working men and women left agriculture,
forestry and fishing, moving into jobs in secon-
dary industry (mining,* manufacturing,
construction and utilities) and, to a much
greater extent, into commercial and service
* Because of its highly capital-intensive technique of pro-
duction, bauxite operations created only 6,000 new jobs
between 1950 and 1970.
jobs. (The explosive growth of government
employment in the postwar and particularly
post-independence period, was a significant
aspect of the shift into services.) As a result, bet-
ween 1943 and 1970, the non-agricultural com-
ponent of the labor force increased by 66%,
while agriculture’s share only increased by 2%.
The relative decrease of agricultural produc-
ers, who comprised nearly half of the total work
force on the eve of modernization and slightly
more than one-third 25 years later, occurred
largely through massive internal migration to
Jamaica’s economic hub. Throughout the late
40s, 50s and 60s, young adults–and especially
young women abandoning their unpaid work
on family farms-left the rural parishes and
crowded into the Kingston Metropolitan Area
(KMA). By 1972, the KMA housed 38% of the
labor force (and 30% of Jamaica’s entire
population), a 15% increase since the start of
postwar overhaul.
Many young women arriving from the coun-
tryside took up domestic work. Some moved on
to other service and clerical jobs, but only a
handful found work in manufacturing. Men
more readily landed jobs in the new industries
like cement and clay production and food and
beverage processing, in the small wood and
metal workshops, and in construction and dock
work. But the still-chronic plague of unemploy-
ment and underemployment forced many of
the immigrants to earn a marginal living par-
tially or completely outside the channels of
regular wage employment.
LET THEM EAT CAKE
Twenty years of almost unbroken economic
expansion had not only transformed the island’s
industrial structure and the corresponding dis-
tribution of its labor force, but it also repro-
duced the very surplus labor problem it was
ostensibly aimed at solving. The scarcity of
regular jobs at “reasonable” wages condemned
part of the labor force to low-income, own-ac-
count (self-employed) activity in street and mar-
ket vending and handicrafts like dressmaking or
skilled trades like carpentry–already partially
displaced by the expansion of industry. It also
swelled the ranks of the “scuffler,” a figure long
familiar to the streets of Kingston–and to the
urban ghettos of the United States.
Scuffling actually combines two methods of
eking out an existence–“the intermittent and
6JanlFeb 1981
Roadside vending-even the children pitch in.
marginal sale of labor-power and the finding of
substitutes for that sale.”‘ Occasional wage-
labor, grabbed when and where available, per-
haps on the docks or at construction sites, sup-
plements income from” ‘occupations’ like car-
minding, casual messengering and postering,
postcard selling, finding parking spaces, open-
ing doors, cleaning cars, shoe shining, street
hawking goods in infinitesimal quantities. .. .,”
as well as burglaring, prostitution and ganja
(marijuana) trafficking. 9
But scuffling, like marginal own-account
work, is itself a part-time occupation for many
ostensibly employed’members of the working
class. In a 1968 island-wide sample survey, 27 %
of those holding jobs in the previous year work-
ed less than eight months and 40% worked less
than 10 months.’ 0 High rates of urban under-
employment, particularly in construction and
manufacturing, pushed the working-class poor
into substitute activities. This remarkable fluid-
ity between independent small producers,
lumpen proletariat and working-class poor
who, moreover, share the same neighborhoods,
has tended to blur the distinctions. In their own
definition, the slum dwellers of Kingston and
St. Andrew are all “sufferers.”
NO SUFFERERS AMONG THE
CAPITALISTS
Limited industrialization and wage employ-
ment, a now-familiar outcome of third world
postwar modernization, is not an index of the
failure of capitalist development, at least in its
own terms. Indeed, it is a measure of the profit-
able accumulation of capital, particularly so for
the transnational corporations that controlled
more than half of all Jamaica’s economic activ-
ity by the late 1960s.
While maximizing corporate profits, the pat-
tern of their investments undercut the establish-
ment of industrial linkages and the spread of
employment within Jamaica. Elements of this
pattern–vertical integration across the ocean
(bauxite mining in Jamaica and aluminum
smelting in Arkansas); multinational sourcing
of output (milling of sugar cane from Jamaica,
Guyana and Barbados); the preponderance of
inputs imported from parent companies or
overseas suppliers; and capital-intensive techni-
ques of production – cheapened company costs
and pushed up profits, but limited industrial
growth on the island.
Equally important in the “failure” of
modernization was the contradictory process of
capital penetration in the countryside. The
land and labor requirements of accelerated in-
vestment in export agriculture impelled capital
to partially dispossess the peasantry, thrusting
thousands of rural Jamaicans into the island’s
industrial center.
But many thousands of small farmers re-
mained, a result in part, of the very same pro-
cess of capitalist investment (as we will see in the
next article). The persistence of this peasantry,
whose livelihood capital continued to under-
mine, severely restricted the internal mar-
ket-for large-scale production of domestic
food crops and its requisite industrial inputs,
and for consumer goods industries and their
suppliers. It thereby restricted the expansion of
industry and employment for the KMA’s
newcomers.
Through its impact on the countryside,
capital propelled 560,000 rural Jamaicans into
urban centers between 1943 and 1970. Despite
its rate of unemployment that rarely fell below
20%, the KMA drew 300,000. For many others,
however, widespread unemployment in the
capital was an important element in their deci-
sion to go abroad.
We turn now to investigate the process by
which agribusiness expansion gave rise to these
internal and external wanderings of Jamaica’s
rural gypsies.
References
MIGRATION’S MOTOR
1. Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings. TheJamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and its Aftermath (The Hague: Mar- tinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 43-4. 2. Franklin Abrams, as cited in Ransford W. Palmer, Caribbean Dependence on the U.S. Economy (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1979), p. 89. 3. On the Puerto Rican experience, see the forthcoming NACLA Report on the A mericas, Vol. XV, no. 2 (March- April 1981). 4. For a full discussion of the incentive legislation, see Owen Jefferson, The Postwar Economic Development of Jamaica (Kingston: Institute for Social and Economic Re- search, 1972), pp. 129-32. 5. On the role of bauxite inJamaica’s economic and po-
litical life, see “Caribbean Conflict: Jamaica and the
U.S.,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. XII, no. 3
(May-June 1978).
6. Philip Wheaton andJeb Mays, eds.,Jamaica: Carib-
bean Challenge (Washington: EPICA Task Force, 1979),
p. 49.
7. Shirley Smith, “Industrial Growth, Employment
Opportunities and Migration Within and From Jamaica,
1943 to 1970,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania,
1975), p. 119.
8. Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings, p. 160.
9. W.F. Maunder, Employment in an Underdeveloped
Area: A Sample Survey ofKingston,Jamaica (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1960)
10. Owen Jefferson, Postwar Economic Development,
p. 34.
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