Word: blue-collar
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...irony of hardworking blue-collar families drinking from contaminated wells or lugging five-gallon cans for miles to their kitchens is most galling, of course, to the have-nots themselves. "We keep hearing promises -- water pretty soon, pretty soon," laments Celia Mendoza, who homesteaded here with her husband and two young daughters four years ago. "But most of it has turned out to be a bunch of lies...
...fixed address, but Toledo provides as good a vantage point as any to watch the couch-potato campaign of 1988. This slowly reviving industrial city of 338,000 has more than its share of card-carrying Reagan Democrats -- and all of Michael Dukakis' victory scenarios depend on wooing these blue-collar defectors back to the fold. But the struggle for their hearts and minds is oddly disembodied. Even a Dukakis visit to Toledo last week was merely a cameo for the cameras. Here, as elsewhere, the election has become largely reduced to the impressions created by the 300,000 tiny...
...formed in one west Toledo household, where Betty and Raymond Heitger invited about a dozen of their friends and neighbors over to watch the heartbeat-away sweepstakes. Betty, a registered nurse, and Raymond, a high school math teacher, were Bush backers. Many of their guests were the kind of blue-collar voters and nominal Democrats who may swing the election. Typical was Greg Kretz, a 30-year-old carpenter, who said before the debate, "I like the job Reagan has done, but I don't think that Bush has the same kind of leadership." Yet Kretz was not committed...
...jobs in his local has dropped from 450 to 250 in the past 15 years. Though the Forrester children have done far better than some of their counterparts elsewhere who work at minimum-wage jobs, they still face a stark choice common to many high school-educated children of blue-collar workers: either to make it into a well-paid but precarious union job or to walk off an economic cliff into a nonunion service-sector job that pays a fraction of such wages...
...world looked very different to Bob Forrester when he married Carol in 1953 and began a new life in Los Angeles. He grew up in East St. Louis, where his father earned a modest blue-collar wage as an engineer in a chemical plant. Carol came from Staten Island, from two generations of longshoremen. Neither Bob nor Carol went to college. But back then, lack of a degree was no impediment to swift upward mobility, and for Bob a union labor job was the quickest ticket into the booming American middle class...