Word: collaring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Until now, the blue-collar worker has carried the brunt. Last month white-collar unemployment showed its first significant jump, from 3.8% to 4.1%. Easter-season retail hiring was lower than usual, and defense and aerospace layoffs began to hit engineers. One relieving statistic: last month black unemployment rose slowly (from 7% to 7.1%). Over the past year, the black unemployment rate has been rising only about half as fast as the overall rate. The "last-hired, first-fired" pattern may be fading...
...attackers are using just about every weapon available. Office buildings, banks and department stores have been damaged by bricks, fire and bombs. Petty thievery and white-collar crime are rising. The National Association of Retail Merchants reported that shortages of goods rose by 10% in 1968, the latest recorded year. The shortages amounted to about $3 billion, equal to 1.7% of total U.S. retail sales. For some stores, losses from shoplifting and employee pilferage are running as high as 6%. Last year some $50 million worth of securities vanished from Wall Street banks and brokerage houses...
While discrimination exists on all levels of the economy, the focus of attention lately has been on the blue-collar trades. In the unionized trades there is an unwritten rule: the higher the pay, the harder for blacks to get in and get ahead. At latest count, in the high-paying trades-plumbers, sheet-metal workers, electrical workers, elevator constructors-less than 1% of the workers are black. Philadelphia counted proportionately more blacks in skilled trades 70 years ago than it does today, although its black population has increased...
...youngsters. They are tutored for six to twelve weeks, mainly in math and reading comprehension, in preparation for apprenticeship exams. The program has been less than a great success, partly because blacks find it difficult to believe that after decades of discrimination they are now welcome in the blue collar areas. Since it began in 1967, Outreach has placed only 5,633 blacks, 56% of them in the construction trades...
...offices and executive suites, blacks face more subtle problems. Whitney Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, has a vivid description of how the world of white-collar work appears to a black man. "We can still usually tell what floor we are on in a corporation by the whiteness of it," he says. "In the basement, it might be all black; on the first floor, it's sort of polka dot. But as you go up, it gets whiter, and soon you get near the top, and except for that guard or receptionist out front...