There was a time when if you just got a high school education and you were willing to work hard, you could get a job in a trade or in the factory that paid a middle-class wage.

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In 1954 in Hamamatsu, where his factory was located, he started a class to teach the rudiments of music to young children.

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The story concerns a typist in a cork factory, a single mother, who becomes class-conscious upon seeing the police brutally repress a strike.

NEWYORKER: Miss Mend

And now that so many of them are middle-class professionals, the glue of believing that they all worked on the factory floor has also dissolved.

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Saturday mornings, the sidewalks are clogged with students marching to class clutching rolled-up mats, the way you used to see factory men trudging to work with their lunch pails.

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Six decades ago, Detroit was a city of nearly two million people brimming with factory jobs that offered immigrants from the South and abroad a pathway into the American middle class.

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It was built by the middle class. (Applause.) It was built by farmers and factory workers, and startups and small businesses, and companies that sent American products overseas, not sending American jobs overseas.

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In December workers at Mercedes's Sindelfingen factory near Stuttgart went on strike after the company said it would shift production of its C-Class cars to Alabama, so Mercedes promised to maintain employment at the plant until 2020.

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