Below is another excerpt from my upcoming book on Johnstown by the numbers. It is a discussion of the job mobility of East central European immigrants in the steel mills in Johnstown, PA from 1900-1950.
Ewa Morawska (1985) in For Bread with Butter: Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890-1940 thoroughly chronicles the struggles of East
Central European Immigrants namely Slavic, Hungarian, and Austrian immigrants
in the city in the early part of the 20th century.
Morawska (1985, p. 100) found that in
the steel industry approximately 7% of East Central European immigrants who
remained in the city moved up from unskilled or unspecified semiskilled
laborers in the mills to semiskilled or skilled workers from 1900 to 1920. She also looked at first generation immigrants
who remained from 1915 to 1930 and for 2nd generation immigrants
from 1920 to 1949/50. These numbers are
summarized in the tables below. There
were not enough first generation immigrants to follow from 1900 to 1930. First generation immigrants tended to move
from city to city, especially in the early days that they are in the US.
Table 1a shows how job mobility was
for first generation immigrants from 1900 to 1920 and from 1915 to 1930 and for
second generation from 1920 to 1949/50.
These were immigrants who remained in the city during the periods in
which they were tracked in the Census and the city directories. The numbers on the observed side of the table
are the actual shifts of immigrants from unskilled or unspecified semiskilled
to semiskilled or skilled, vice versa, and immobile (no change in employment status
in the mill over the period). The
Expected with no Discrimination side of the table shows what the numbers that
would be if the overall mobility rates were the same as they were for western European
immigrants or native workers (no discrimination).
Table 1a
Job
mobility from unskilled or unspecified semiskilled to skilled or semiskilled
steelworkers for 1st & 2nd generation East Central European
Immigrants (Morawska, 1985, pp. 100, 164, 166)
Observed %
|
Expected % with no
Discrimination
|
|||||
Period
|
upward mobility
|
downward mobility
|
immobile
|
upward mobility
|
downward mobility
|
immobile
|
1900-1920 1st gen
|
7
|
4
|
89
|
21
|
2
|
77
|
1915-1930 1st gen
|
10
|
4
|
86
|
20
|
4
|
76
|
1920-1949/50 2nd gen
|
17
|
14
|
69
|
31
|
10
|
59
|
The upward
mobility rates for both first generation periods were considerably lower than they
were for the second generation and for the numbers we would expect if there
were no discrimination. The downward
mobility numbers were higher for second generation mill workers than for first
generation workers and for what would be expected if there were no
discrimination. The downward mobility numbers
were identical for the 1900-1920 and the 1915-1930 periods for the first
generation were both nearly identical to what would be expected if there were
no discrimination.
Reference
Morawska, E. (1985). For
Bread with Butter: Worlds of East
Central Europeans in
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890-1940. Cambridge: New York.
