Word: white-collar
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...come to this. White-collar workers are joining the jobless ranks in record numbers, tossed aside by the same companies that not long ago lavished them with signing bonuses and free lattes. Although the Labor Department announced last week that overall unemployment fell slightly to 5.6% in September, the number of white-collar workers who are jobless has doubled from two years ago. Professionals, managers and technical and administrative workers now make up 43% of the unemployed, according to the government. "Of course, other workers are hard hit too," says Jeffrey Wenger, an economist at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute...
...Sopranos has always been masterly at being timeless and up to the moment at once. In the late '90s, the show was a tale of moral struggles in boom times. It analogizes even better to the white-collar scandals of 2002. "The Enrons, the Grubmans and the Global Crossings ... those guys are bigger criminals than the Sopranos," says Pantoliano. "The thing I like about The Sopranos is that if you cross someone, there is retribution. If you are a rat, you will be punished...
...corrupt corporate executives are no better than common thieves when they betray their employees and steal from their investors." He noted that the WorldCom executives could face as much as 65 years in prison, which legal experts dismissed as prosecutorial hyperbole. Yet as former federal prosecutor and Los Angeles white-collar defense lawyer Mark Beck notes, "The criminal sanction is so severe that it can motivate someone to play ball and become a government witness in exchange for leniency...
...increasing numbers of sedentary white-collar workers come to grips with love handles, so too are people like Renrui embracing the fitness culture of their yuppie counterparts in the West. Upscale fitness clubs and gyms are spreading in prosperous cities, while sales of sporting goods have grown from $1.3 billion in 1996 to $1.7 billion in 2000, a 30% rise. "Ten years ago, nobody talked about working out," says Guo Qilong, an editor at the national magazine Southern Sports. "Now there is a very stable industry that's starting to provide more services and focus more on individual needs...
...president, Fields shuttered a factory in Mazda's hometown of Hiroshima, slashed the white-collar payroll by 20% and tied bonuses for directors and middle managers to year-end targets. To improve Mazda's balance sheet, he wrote off a $1.3 billion pension liability. And he had all salaried workers attend a two-day off-site, at which they were told that "Mazda must change or die." Says Katsumi Yoshitake, a 10-year veteran: "We knew we were in bad shape, but it seemed abstract." At the off-site, "a lot of it was bad news, but it made...