Word: collaring
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...unusual for fired top-and middle-level executives to be provided with secretarial help, résumé-writing assistance and psychic support from counselors who help them vent anger and wage effective job campaigns. Bethlehem was the first big firm to give white-and blue-collar employees the same kind of help. It maintains "career continuation centers" for displaced people in Johnstown and Bethlehem, Pa., and in Lackawanna, N. Y., near Buffalo, site of an 83-year-old plant whose shutdown was announced three days after Christmas...
...Lackawanna center functions as a touchstone for 3,000 former Bethlehem employees, and is preparing for 3,100 more who will go on layoff before the year is out. So far, most of the people using the center are foremen or white-collar professionals, those least accustomed to periodic layoffs. The Steelworkers union, still angry at Bethlehem's action, has been slow to embrace the program, finding it unsuitable for its members who, as one union man said, "have jobs, not careers...
...core of this film is its unassuming depiction of the simple bonds of affection tying these blue-collar characters together. The wildcat strike of the workers at the local accentuates the flaws in each person's character, prompting old bonds to be severed and new ones to be cemented. At first glimpse, we think that young Tiao will be the hero of the plot; young, eager, hardworking, he makes plans to marry his girlfriend whom he has made pregnant. But his downfall comes when he cannot see the pitfalls of not participating in the impending strike. Instead, he selfishly goes...
...stereotypes in the theater or the power of good-vs.-evil allegories, however simpleminded. Here the premise is that Mr. Mister (David Schramm), the boss of Steeltown, U.S.A., is a cigar-chomping tyrant, and his gutsy prole of a foe, Larry Foreman (Randle Mell), is a knight in blue-collar armor. We meet Mister's toadies: mousy Reverend Salvation, sycophantic College President Prexy and craven Editor Daily. As a whore with a heart of tarnished nickel, Lisa Banes is achingly vulnerable, and Michele-Denise Woods keens a militant lament for her injured brother in Joe Worker Gets Gypped...
Underlying these specifics, of course, is the tension natural whenever a mobile, fluid, upperclass, academic population mixes with implanted blue collar neighbors. Vellucci, who once called on the city to pave over Harvard Yard and make it into a parking lot, summed up the mentality best in a piece he wrote for The Crimson last spring: "Go into Macarelli's Bar in East Cambridge and ask the truck drivers and meat packers that drink there what they think of Harvard. They'll tell you that it gobbles up all the property in Cambridge and is populated with strange and eccentric...