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Italians
Contents
Little Italies >
Earning a Living > End of the Trans-Atlantic
Migration
Earning a Living
Nearly half of all Italian immigrants and a much higher proportion
of southern Italians were illiterate. Upon arriving many of them
took jobs requiring few skills. This meant they were often day laborers,
like the Irish before them. Laborers headed four in ten Italian
households in 1880. Italians accounted for 90% of the laborers on
New York's public works projects in 1890. By 1900, 25% of all common
laborers in New York were Italian. They built such long-standing
monuments to human labor as the Bronx Aqueduct and Grand Central
Terminal.
Because of their willingness to work for low wages and avoid unions,
Italians were able to break into a number of lucrative industries
dominated by other immigrant groups. In the first decades of the
twentieth century, Italians displaced the Irish as longshoremen
and Jews in the clothing trades. The men weren't the only ones working,
however. Italian women were more likely than any other women to
work outside of the home. In 1910,they accounted for 75% of the
women employed in the men's clothing industry and 35% of those in
the women's clothing industry, laundry, and the tobacco trades.
When the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory caught fire on March 25, 1911,
one-third of the victims were Italian women.
Not all Italians were unskilled laborers and factory workers, though.
By the 1930s, Italian-American women were moving into clerical office
work in large numbers. Many Italians entered professions, fared
well, bought a house, and moved to the suburbs. Others stayed in
the old neighborhoods making a living as peddlers, barbers, running
bars and cafes, as restaurateurs, grocers, and even landlords. Italians
owned half the buildings on Elizabeth Street by 1925, for example,
though most of the landlords lived elsewhere.
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