Blog Series: The 1980s Struggle for Domestic Workers’ Rights - Part 3

On December 19th, 1977, the Committee Against the Deportation of Immigrant Women (CADIW) held its first-ever event and press conference at Toronto City Hall. At this press conference, jointly held with Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), CADIW spokesperson Sherona Hall explained that the group had formed “in response to the growing discrimination and harassment faced by immigrant women.”¹  In addition to leading “the struggle for the human and democratic rights of immigrant women,” CADIW vehemently opposed deportation proceedings against a group of landed immigrant workers who became known as “the Seven Jamaican Mothers.”²  Uniting immigrant women under the slogan “good enough to work, good enough to stay,” CADIW and the Seven Jamaican Mothers helped to shape and to organize the more widespread domestic workers’ rights movement which coalesced in Toronto during the early 1980s.³ 

According to her friend and fellow CADIW activist Makeda Silvera, who co-founded Sister Vision Press and wrote extensively on immigrant women’s rights, Hall had been heavily involved in Toronto’s black community since the early 1970s, working as a legal advocate and “organizing demonstrations to protest police shootings and other injustices.”⁴  Herself an immigrant from Kingston, Jamaica, Hall argued that the government blamed Canada’s employment crisis on immigrants, effectively punishing these workers for “its own economic mismanagement.”⁵  The Toronto Committee Against Racism made a similar statement in their 1978 rally flyer titled “Save the Seven”: 

The arbitrary decision to deport these women, all black, because they did not list all their children on their applications to come to Canada is part of the government’s increasingly racist immigration policy. Such actions, and the government’s efforts to blame immigrants for the unemployment brought on by the economic recession, actually encourage racism across the country. These women, Lola Anderson, Eliza Cox, Carmen Hyde, Elaine Peart, Gloria Lawrence, Elizabeth Lodge, and Rubina White, all landed immigrants, came to Canada at a time when their labour was needed. All the mothers work to support their children who still live in Jamaica. They deserve your support, and in defiance of the government’s plan to use racism to divide the working class, workers all over Canada have shown tremendous support.⁶
 

The Seven Jamaican Mothers were facing deportation for having each failed to declare dependent children on their immigration forms, even though these children did not accompany them to Canada. According to Western University professor Erica Lawson, these proceedings reflect the legacy of The West Indian Domestic Scheme (WIDS), an agreement between the Canadian government and the governments of several English-speaking Caribbean countries which lasted from 1955 until 1967. The WIDS sought to address an acute shortage of domestic workers in Canada while simultaneously providing jobs for Caribbean women who were struggling under economic crises caused by North America’s imperialist intervention in the West Indies, not to mention the region’s legacy of British colonial violence. To qualify for WIDS, women had to be between 18 and 40 years old, unmarried, and “without minor-aged children or the encumbrance of common-law relationships.”⁷  After one year, these women could apply for landed status and were then permitted to work outside of the domestic sphere.

The WIDS had officially ended before deportation proceedings were brought against the Seven Jamaican Mothers. However, Lawson says, the program’s construction and regulation of black women as “immoral” single mothers, and therefore potential burdens to the Canadian state, influenced immigration officials’ decisions for years to come. Lawson argues that “the reductionist criteria for gaining entry to Canada reflected the state's trepidation towards racialized bodies, which were perceived as threats to an imagined white community. Importantly, the women's refusal to return to Jamaica was informed by financial commitments through remittances [to their families back home] and maternal responsibilities.”⁸  By vowing to fight their deportation orders, these women made Canada’s racist immigration policies visible, and highlighted the Canadian state’s exploitation and devaluation of Black women’s labour. In the words of Elaine Peart, “we were brought here to clean rich folks' home and now we're not cleaning rich folks' homes, so you want to throw us out.”⁹  Additionally, the Seven Jamaican Mothers led many Canadian women to fight for immigrant women’s issues under the banner of maternal solidarity. 
 

CADIW not only supported immigrant women through press conferences, speaking engagements, and protest rallies, but also initiated a fund-raising campaign to secure legal representation for Caribbean women threatened with deportation. According to a 1977 CADIW circular, “immigrant women fighting deportation orders pay thousands of dollars in legal fees and court expenses and in many cases lose their jobs because of excessive time taken off for inquiries and meetings with immigration officials.”¹⁰  Even before deportation proceedings were begun against the Seven Jamaican Mothers, immigration officials had been “cracking down” on immigrant women, particularly women from the Caribbean. According to Hall, in 1977, “an official of the Immigration Department was quoted as saying that approximately forty per cent of deportation cases pending at the Immigration Department involve Jamaican mothers.”¹¹  Moreover, many women in Toronto’s West Indian and East Indian communities testified to the brutality of immigration officers who invaded their homes, tore through their belongings, and even used physical violence in their pursuit of “illegal immigrants.”¹² 

In her writing for CADIW, Hall crafted arguments in support of the Jamaican Mothers through an anti-imperialist analytical framework: 

Immigrants, primarily those from third world countries, have been used as a source of cheap labour in this country by Canadian corporate interests such as Noranda Mines, Inco, Falcon Bridge, Alcan, and financial institutions such as Bank of Nova Scotia and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, with ‘massive imperialist investment in third world countries.’ Men and women in the Caribbean and Latin America, for example, are forced to work for an average of $40.00 per month in factories and mines owned by Canadian corporations. During a period of economic expansion in Canada, these same men and women are encouraged to emigrate and work at substandard wages in this country. Jobs that Canadian workers are reluctant to accept; hotel and office cleaning, dishwashing, factory, and construction work, have historically been filled by immigrants.¹³

Furthermore, she stated, while Canada “donates a hundred million dollars in ‘aid’ to the Jamaican government, they simultaneously deport large numbers of Jamaican mothers and children back to Jamaica, creating an increased economic burden on the Jamaican economy.” ¹⁴
 

Lawson’s historical analysis serves to clarify Hall’s critique of Western “financial aid” for “third world countries.” For example, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) provided Jamaica with a loan to address the country’s economic crisis in 1978, they did so on condition that the government would implement Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). SAPs involved austerity measures such as laying off civil service workers, reducing public services, and opening the country up to cheap foreign goods. While such programs benefitted international corporations through “trade liberalization,” they had a detrimental effect on the country’s urban poor, especially for women who now had reduced access to employment, limited access to social services, and an increased demand on their time because they had to find new ways of supporting their families.¹⁵

Because Jamaican women’s immigration to Canada benefitted both the Jamaican government (through remittances sent back to the country) and the Canadian government (through maintaining a pool of cheap domestic labour), Jamaican officials had told the Seven Jamaican Mothers that they should not declare dependent children on their immigration forms.¹⁶ The Canadian government, however, behaved as if this was a deliberate lie orchestrated by the women themselves. Noting that it was Caribbean women, and not men, who were most frequently targeted by deportation orders, Hall argued that immigrant women were not only threatened by the sexist discrimination of job ghettoization, low wages, social service cutbacks, and oppression in their family situations, but also “further threatened by the double blow of racism and sexism. They are discriminated against for being women, as immigrants, and in the case of West Indians, for being Black as well.”¹⁷
 

In January 1979, the Seven Jamaican Mothers were forced to leave the country and returned to Jamaica. Six months later, however, they were able to reenter Canada on permits from the minister of employment and immigration.¹⁸  By fighting their deportation orders, the Seven Jamaican Mothers helped to publicize connections between racism, sexism, and imperialism, and alongside CADIW, were one of the first women’s groups to push for changes to Canada’s labour and immigration laws. The slogan “good enough to work, good enough to stay” became a rallying cry for immigrant workers and was enthusiastically taken up by INTERCEDE’s campaign for landed status which began in 1979 and continued throughout the early 1980s.

This year, the Women’s Archives at the University of Ottawa Library wishes to celebrate immigrant women and their contribution to obtaining human rights in Canada. This is part three of a series of blog posts on the 1980s struggle for domestic workers rights, leading up to the celebration of International Domestic Workers’ Day on June 16th, 2024. Visit migrantrights.ca to read more about the ongoing struggle for migrant workers’ rights and demand #StatusforAll.
 

Notes

1. Sherona Hall, “Announcement of Press Conference” (19 December 1977), Committee Against the Deportation of Immigrant Women (CADIW), CMWA Collection, University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections, 10-001-S1-F629
2. Sherona Hall, Circular Letter (28 December 1977), Committee Against the Deportation of Immigrant Women (CADIW), CMWA Collection, University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections, 10-001-S1-F629
3. Erica Lawson, “The Gendered Working Lives of Seven Jamaican Women in Canada: A Story about "Here" and "There" in a Transnational Economy,” Feminist Formations, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013) 138-156.
4. Makeda Silvera, “Sherona Hall April 26, 1948–December 30, 2006: A Tribute,” Canadian Women’s Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, https://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/view/5912/5101 
5. Hall, Circular Letter (28 December 1977).
6. Committee Against Racism, “Save the Seven” flyer, CMWA Collection, University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections, 10-001-S1-F629
7. Lawson, “The Gendered Working Lives of Seven Jamaican Women,” 139. 
8. Lawson, “The Gendered Working Lives of Seven Jamaican Women,” 141.
9. Elaine Peart qtd. in Lawson, “The Gendered Working Lives of Seven Jamaican Women,” 139. 
10. Hall, Circular Letter (28 December 1977).
11. Ibid. 
12. Ibid. 
13. Sherona Hall, “CADIW Position Paper” (c. 1977), Committee Against the Deportation of Immigrant Women (CADIW), CMWA Collection, University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections, 10-001-S1-F629
14. Ibid. 
15. Lawson, “The Gendered Working Lives of Seven Jamaican Women,” 146-147.
16. Hall, “CADIW Position Paper” (c. 1977); Lawson, “The Gendered Working Lives of Seven Jamaican Women,” 139.
17. Hall, “CADIW Position Paper” (c. 1977).
18. Lawson, “The Gendered Working Lives of Seven Jamaican Women,” 150.