This was the third time I've been to Mansfield since the lockout started and the Steelworker families of Local 169 are still strong in the face of adversity. No regular income for over a year has got to hurt and hurt bad.
Prior to the lock out by AK, the steel corporation had enjoyed almost 30 years of labor peace! The union had even given the corporation givebacks in the late 80's early 90's to insure the corportions financial health. What did the Steelworkers get for their sacrafices---paramilitary security guards brought into scare the Steelworkers before the lock out. The high tech riot equipped type of goon with the hand slapping technique.
Tom Lehman
Carl Remick wrote:
> [From today's NY Times. Full text is at
> http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/10/national/10FAMI.html]
>
> Working Families Strain to Live Middle-Class Life
>
> By Louis Uchitelle
>
> When Vice President Al Gore incorporated "working families" into his
> rhetoric last month and "hard-working middle-class families" this month as
> pivotal campaign phrases, he pointed a finger — unintentionally perhaps — at
> a central fact of American life: most of the nation's 72 million families
> feel they cannot make ends meet.
>
> Three-quarters earn less than $75,000 a year and 45 percent of all families
> earn $30,000 to $75,000, the range of middle-class incomes in most of
> America. No one argues that middle-income families cannot put food on the
> table, pay the mortgage, own a car or two, take a modest vacation. What
> stresses them, sociologists and economist say, are the other outlays of
> middle-class life: new clothes, child care, lessons for the children,
> restaurants, movies, home decoration, computers, big-screen television sets,
> stereo systems, Christmas gifts, and saving for college and retirement.
>
> "'Working families' is a code phrase with a variety of meanings, and one is
> middle-class people trying to live only on wages, not earnings from
> investments," said Barrie Thorne, a sociologist and the co-director of the
> Center for Working Families at the University of California at Berkeley.
> "They can't do it and they feel nonaffluent and not adequately compensated
> for the number of hours they must work to make ends meet."
>
> [end of excerpt]
>
> Carl
>
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