Word: menials
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...some, this task is still a very difficult one. Stripped of the comforting shelter of parish life, the secularized cleric is transferred, in the words of one ex-priest, from "total security to total insecurity." Many have no means of support. Others have too willingly settled for the first menial job that comes along. Their training, often exclusively in theology, is not exactly a marketable commodity...
...Latin America and the Middle East, dirt-poor farmers and peasants whose forebears never dreamed of leaving the land are trekking to cities by the millions. Instead of finding the promised good life and good pay, most of them end up in a demoralized, debt-ridden limbo of menial jobs and ghetto housing. This contemporary demographic disaster is the subject of Voyage of Silence, a somber documentation of a Portuguese peasant's emigration to France. Produced by Philippe de Broca-a new wave filmmaker best known for frothy fantasy (That Man from Rio, The Five-Day Lover)-the movie...
Outmoded administrative systems that force every recruit to start off in the lowest rank discourage the educated and the enterprising from becoming policemen. Every would-be police chief has to serve a menial apprenticeship; no one from outside, regardless of his qualifications, can come in at the middle. Some, like Reddin, favor lateral entry, commonplace in every other organization, but none have succeeded in changing the ossified structure of the police establishment. Pay is equally out of date; the median for patrolmen in big cities...
Vocational education has always suffered from an inferiority complex-a product, perhaps, of the "golden streets" myth that made 19th century immigrants feel that a trade was vaguely unAmerican. The fact is that modern technology has done away with many of the most menial tasks and thereby created millions of jobs for such skilled workers as laboratory technicians, draftsmen and electronics specialists. In the most specialized fields, blue-collar workers actually earn more than their white-collar counterparts. Yet once a student forgoes college hopes to enter a vocational program, he runs the risk of fading into instant obsolescence...
...unskilled and uneducated Irishman was the social outcast of the time. Terrorized by slum gangs (the Dead Rabbits and the Patsey Conroys), shunned by native Americans who despised his rough, alien ways, his papist religion and his uncouth brogue, the average Irish immigrant had to work at the most menial and degrading jobs, and he lived in desperate resentment. He certainly had no stake in the Civil War; indeed, it was the news that he would be subjected to a draft lottery, while well-heeled citizens could buy exemption for $300, that finally sparked frustration into rage and sent...