Word: craftsmen
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...today, the face of blue-collar skill is aging. Small tool shops cannot replace craftsmen as they retire. Larger machinery manufacturers cannot find willing younger men to train in order to expand production and grow. West Coast aerospace giants like Boeing and Lockheed constantly raid each other's work forces in the hunt for skilled people. At a tune when one in 13 U.S. workers is unemployed, jobs by the hundreds of thousands in many of the economy's most vital sectors are going begging for the lack of trained people...
Just as Goth stonecutters who chiseled ornate facades for Europe's grand Gothic cathedrals were master craftsmen of the Middle Ages, tool-and diemakers are premier artisans of the industrial era. Instead of granite or limestone, their medium hard metal. They create the tools that can cut metal into precise patterns and the dies to mold it into complex shapes...
...tradition of tool-and diemaking is as old as the industrial age. Many of the earliest practitioners were blacksmiths who turned their forging talents to toolmaking. In the 18th century, craftsmen gathered in the manufacturing hubs of England, France, Germany and Sweden to fashion tools that would enable machines to produce items like clocks and locks. The trade flourished most dramatically in America. In the early 1800s, Eli Whitney helped to pioneer mass production, using standardized, interchangeable parts at his Connecticut musket factory. By the early 1900s, the toolmaker's skills enabled machines to engrave the Lord...
...steadily declined in the past 30 years, as young people have sought out better-paying, less demanding jobs. Next year U.S. companies will have openings for 8,600 tool-and-die workers. If the recent past is any guide, training programs will graduate fewer than half of the craftsmen needed...
...Americans don't spend all of their time on the Ponderosa spread or in suburban kitchens. Some people actually work for a living, and those people became the focus for some of TV's finest series: Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, Lou Grant, WKRP in Cincinnati (all by craftsmen who worked for, or had graduated from, MTM Enterprises). In Hill Street Blues (written for MTM by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, and directed by Robert Butler), all is motion and commotion; for Hill Street is part of a nameless inner city, and the Blues are the men and women...