ABSTRACT
While teaching vocational carpentry in a public high school in the late 1970s, I often heard the 12th-grade schoolboys (only one female enrolled in the program during my 5-year tenure) talk about following their fathers into the shop floor production line. For these White, working-class males occupational futures in blue-collar industry seemed almost reflexive, entry-level jobs with advancement were plentiful, Their placement records during the time I was teaching appear to confirm the cheery employment picture. Each year about two-thirds of my 25 graduating seniors students reported fulltime employment (33% worked in the field for which they were trained), another half-a-dozen entered the military, and the few remaining were unemployed.
