Word: blue-collar
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...family breadwinners. The unemployment rate for adult women was lower than for men (7.5%), but the rate of joblessness among women with families to support was also a postwar record 10.7% during the last three months of 1981. And while the burden of joblessness still falls most heavily on blue-collar workers, it is spreading into the ranks of white-collar employees: from December 1980 to December 1981, white-collar unemployment rose from...
...there were several unresolved issues. GM and the union could not agree on job guarantees for production workers or on how to limit the shift of auto-parts production to cheaper, nonunion manufacturers. There was also disagreement on how to match benefit cuts of blue-collar workers with those of white-collar employees...
...Reagan and his party, economic paralysis is even more dangerous than it was to Ford and Carter. The Republicans swept into power in 1980 by promising a massive revitalization of the economy that would primarily benefit blue-collar workers. Convening, appropriately, in Detroit itself, they proclaimed a "new populism" based on supply-side economics. GOP party chairman Bill Brock promised "jobs, jobs, jobs"; the President himself informed the Carpenter's Union several months ago of an imminent "American renaissance that will astound the world; a new era of good feeling in America, a time when jobs will be plentiful...
Such distress is inevitably politically devastating; just ask defeated presidents Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter, both of whom were done in by blue-collar unemployment. Blue-collar unemployment under Ford hit 11.7 per cent, lingering at 9.4 per cent on election day. Under Carter, the figure rose from 6.9 per cent in 1979 to 8.9 per cent for the first five months of 1980. Ronald Reagan doesn't face the voters for two and a half years, but unemployment highs under him already exceed marks of his two ill-fated predecessors. The severity of the nation's economic crisis threatens...
...given grudgingly--people who have voted Democratic all their lives would often rather fight than switch. Reagan's victory was a cautious mandate born of desperation, not an enthusiastically written blank check. The failure of Reaganomics to deliver jobs sets the stage for an especially harsh backlash heightened by blue-collar feelings of betrayal...