Word: blue-collar
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Industries left and blue-collar jobs vanished forever. Those who remained, the unemployed white ethnics in the suburbs and the unemployed people of color in the cities, were stuck. The burnt-out shells left behind are as bad as it gets, the American versions of third-world slums. They are hermetically sealed: No one ever goes in, and no one ever gets out. They make a land of equal opportunity a land of savage inequality...
Changes in the American economy have left employees more vulnerable, especially the ones in unskilled blue-collar jobs. Labor unions, which can step in to remedy unsafe conditions, now represent just 18% of the work force. Some of the most injury-prone industries, like food processing and textiles, have clustered in right-to-work states across the South, where labor organizers get the kind of welcome that used to greet Freedom Riders...
...monument to Vladimir Ilyich? Mayor Georges Valbon grins broadly and shakes his head. "I was suckled on the milk of the October Revolution," he says. "Lenin was a symbol of hope for French workers and intellectuals." With his monogrammed shirts and rough-hewn charm, Valbon, 67, has ruled blue-collar Bobigny, a northeastern suburb of Paris, for two decades, winning by 66% in the past mayoral election. "Communism is still on the horizon," he contends. "We build it little by little, not by decree...
...annual barbecue in honor of the people who slaughtered the pigs, and made the hot dog, and trucked it to market and bagged it for you. The little guy and gal, that is, the working stiffs. They need all the honor they can get these days. At the rate blue-collar wages are falling, the U.S. is going to reinvent slavery in the next few decades, only without any of its nice, redeeming features, such as room and board...
These are not isolated, exotic cases. Nationwide, the fraction of the work force earning wages that are inadequate to lift a family out of poverty rose from 25.7% in 1979 to 31.5% in 1987. During the '80s, the average hourly compensation of all blue-collar workers, computed in constant dollars, fell $1.68, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and those who were earning the least tended to lose the most. In what some sociologists call the "new working class" -- which is disproportionately made up of minorities and the young and female of all races -- work may be a fine ingredient...