Word: sandhog
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...week. The job will take years and men's lives. Some will get careless and fall down shafts; others will be blown up when they stick their drills into holes containing unexploded charges. Most will succumb to what can euphemistically be called the sandhog's life-style, a grimy regimen that scorns the world of paper pushers and blots out feelings with alcohol...
SEVEN HUNDRED FEET BELOW the beauty of Central Park, "sandhogs" toil in darkness and cold, hammering through rock and laying the foundation for famous skyscrapers and sewer lines. Seven hundred feet below the lights of Time Square, the darker side of the New York City underworld surfaces in Thomas Kelly's first novel, Payback, a look into the opulent 80s construction business that thrived on Reaganomics and mob violence. Kelly, who worked for ten years as a sandhog before graduating from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, brings his own underground expertise to a sordid story of hard men, hard...
Still, the family ties run deep: Billy and Paddy's father was the first of twenty-three men to die in the construction of Water Tunnel Three twenty years earlier, and Billy has returned to Hell's Kitchen once more to work as a sandhog in the tunnel to pay for his first year of law school. If the union disintegrates, he may not be able to make the money he needs to move beyond the streets of Hell's Kitchen and into a new world...
...forge an alliance with the Mafia that is potentially lethal. If he refuses, he will be eradicated by the violence that has made him rich. Both brothers are faced with impossible choices and impossible decisions that draw them deeper into the world of the New York underground than a sandhog ever ventured...
Amid these portents, the U.S. laboring man in his great variety-from the sandhog in the bowels of a city to the window washer high above, from the production line worker to the sedentary clerk-has taken a historic step. Now that he has more money than ever, he has turned to the next need: security. In current contract negotiations throughout the U.S., the stress is on job security, early retirement and increased pensions. A contract signed last week between Armour and two meatpacking unions guarantees that workers displaced by machines will continue to earn their previous wages-even...