Reflecting on her experiences looking for work after she graduated from commercial college in the 1930s, Gladys Bustamante, the wife of the first prime minister of independent Jamaica, noted: ‘Because I was not of light complexion, I could not hold a job of any kind in a commercial bank. Though I was proficient in arithmetic and knew how to speak to people, I could not find employment selling cloth, shoes or books in any King Street store’. This chapter will illustrate that it was not only during the worldwide economic depression that African Jamaicans ‘not of light complexion’ struggled to find work. Even long after independence, there were parts of the labour market that were effectively closed to dark-skinned Jamaicans, while in others they were rarely found in management positions.

The following chronological sections explore, first, the various methods that contributed to a stratification of the labour market by race and colour and, second, the ways in which this stratification was (or was not) talked about. In doing so, this chapter will demonstrate some real advancements made by dark-skinned Jamaicans on the labour market but also point to the ways in which the government and individual African-Jamaican men and women helped to sustain an unequal labour market. This is not to say, however, that there was no opposition to exclusionary employment practices during the period under consideration. The following will in fact mention various instances whereby black politicians and others questioned hiring processes and made proposals to create a more level playing field. Through a careful analysis and contextualisation of their race talk, an explanation will be provided as to why their interventions failed to have a significant impact.

Although discrimination was most noticeable in the private sector between 1918 and 1980, it was not absent in the public sector. The civil service and the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) are used here as case studies for the public sector, while shops, banks, and tourism-related enterprises provide most of the evidence relating to the private sector. This chapter focusses largely on the concerns of middle-class African Jamaicans because race and colour ideas and practices particularly affected jobs for which a certain degree of education was needed.