Once Michigan stood proud. In addition to GM, Ford and Chrysler, it was home base for the United Auto Workers, a powerful escalator transporting hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers into America's middle class.
I did grow up poor. My mom managed to get a job as a custodian at our church, and it was really just a favor for her, and my dad's an electrician - just a blue-collar family, and the house was usually falling apart.
I'll always have this blue-collar connection. For every guy, there is an opportunity to be a lot better than he thought he could be. We can't all be the star of the team, but we can be a star in our life.
I've tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don't like it when people are deferential to me because I'm an established filmmaker. It's a blue-collar sensibility.
I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.
The only honourable work my parents knew was blue-collar. But while my father Robert ran a pawnbroker's shop, and my mother was a waitress, I moved into a middle-class world with a level of security they never knew.
Dress up and wait for me outside your house. I’ll show you a pleasure-seeking night full of gluttony and lust. And that’s only the ride in Her Majesty.
Joe Frazier was the epitome of a champion. I mean, here is a guy who was total old school, blue collar, who would fight anybody. You know, he didn't tell you he was the best fighter pound for pound.
I'm entirely uneducated. I went to public school - public in the American sense - a blue-collar, working-class school. I never got a scholarship, I left when I was 15, never did any exams.
'Detroit 1-8-7' - the numbers are police slang for murder - is filmed in that blue-collar Michigan city, providing a flavor of authenticity. Detroit offers a unique visual landscape that tells the story of the city and what it's been through.
For the blue-collar worker, the driving force behind change was factory automation using programmable machine tools. For the office worker, it's office automation using computer technology: enterprise-resource-planning systems, groupware, intranets, ...
To me, country music's about life. It's about Monday through Friday. It's the blue-collar, 40-hour week, songs about life. It used to have more of a sound, but I think the heart of that's still the same. It's still American music.
I grew up in a modest neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles. It was an industrial community of blue-collar, working people... some of the hardest-working people I've ever met.
But it's much more exciting to make Die Hard. One of the reasons that I think that movie is so successful is it deals with those very important blue-collar relationship themes. But it's more visually beautiful to show things blowing up. It just gives...
Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who received a kidney from his wife.
I didn't have to go all the way to India for spiritual enlightenment. The blue-collar spirituality of everyday life was right in front of me, it was in every nook and cranny if I wanted to seek it, but I had chosen to ignore it.
I come from a blue-collar town - and being from that place, you learn not to let anybody take advantage of you. You don't let people mistreat you. You stand up for what's right.
Not all Republicans are rich, dress in three-piece suits, and have $200 haircuts. I'm somebody who's lived from paycheck to paycheck. I'm focusing on my blue-collar roots - I've worked side by side with union people.
As much as I'd like to think and as much as people mistakenly think my audience is blue collar people in the heart of America, my audience is basically, in the States, an NPR audience. I play college towns in the summer because that's who comes to se...
When I talk about rock n' roll, to me, that goes back to the beginning of the 1950s. Blue suede shoes and sideburns, man. Pink and black coloured clothes. Turn your collar up, comb your hair in ducktails. And the music was cool. It was a whole cultur...
In Britain, the idea one could go from blue-collar beginnings to the university was so far out, it was quite unthinkable. I took a variety of jobs to pay for tuition - from ice-cream salesman to night-club bouncer. Whatever earned the most money in t...
