Word: tools
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like stepping into an earlier age. The scene is the shop floor of the A & A Tool Co. in southern Connecticut, and the spectacle is of American precision craftsmanship tooling up for the 1980s. The vision is not an encouraging one. Jammed between noisy lathes and oily drill presses stand a dozen men, some far into middle age. Like acolytes of a dying devotion, they practice the art of machinemaking, using skills and techniques that have not changed much in 100 years...
...Tool Co., a precision machining shop with 23 employees and a twelve-month backlog of customer orders in the aircraft and defense industries, is typical of a crisis that is quietly brewing on the shop floors of the nation's plants and factories. From the tiny machine shops of New England to the aerospace hangar sheds of the West Coast, American industry is being squeezed and constricted by a shortage of skilled labor...
...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...
...angiogram is still the most important diagnostic tool, but now doctors also have an array of safe, "noninvasive" tests at their disposal. Among them...
...isotopes that emit charged particles called positrons. A special machine takes simultaneous cross-section views of the heart from different angles; a computer reconstructs the images to give a three-dimensional picture of the heart. "It isn't in clinical use yet, but it's a valuable tool for sophisticated research," says Jeffrey Borer, a cardiologist at New York Hospital...