Blue Collar Shift To Developing Nations
See also: DeindustrializationWith the information revolution Western nations have moved towards a service and white collar economy. Many manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to developing nations which pay their workers lower wages. This outsourcing of jobs has pushed formerly agrarian nations to industrialized economies and concurrently decreased the number of blue-collar jobs in developed countries.
In the United States an area known as the Rust Belt comprising The Midwest, Western New York and Western Pennsylvania, has seen its once large manufacturing base shrink significantly. With the de-industrialization of these areas starting in the mid 1960s cities like Cleveland, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Buffalo, New York, Niagara Falls, New York and Saint Louis, Missouri, have experienced a steady decline of the blue-collar workforce and subsequent population decreases. Due to this economic osmosis, the rust belt has experienced high unemployment, poverty and urban blight.
Read more about this topic: Blue-collar Worker
Famous quotes containing the words blue, collar, shift, developing and/or nations:
“The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die
The broken cartwheel on the hill.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker’s productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband’s pain and suffering.”
—Gloria Steinem (20th century)
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.... The rich and the poor.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)