Published: June 29, 2008 12:23 am            

WOLCOTT: No-collar workers’ time has come

During the world gas price crisis, it might be wise to consider becoming a no-collar worker in the cottage industry. For a translation, that’s doing work at home via phone and computer.

Cottage industry work was big before the Industrial Revolution, although it probably wasn’t called “cottage industry” by the farm families who sewed stuff at home during the winter to pass the time and get money to eat. The term likely was coined by an academic 200 years later who worked on computers.

“No-collar worker” is an obvious offshoot of blue-collar worker and white-collar worker. That’s someone who can communicate with someone in Ecuador or next door in Lockport while in his underwear. The no-collar worker might send stories from a coffee shop. Wii!!

I hadn’t heard the word until this week, when Spiros Antoniadis of Corporate Properties presented the Middleport Village Board with a plan to revitalize the village. Middleport, named the No. 1 town in the state as the best place to raise children, could promote itself as an ideal no-collar town.

There’s a good example. Barry DiGregorio, a free-lance science writer, makes a living writing about space and science while living in Middleport. He helped convince NASA to put a teacher, Barbara Morgan, in space more than 20 years after the Challenger disaster and is a noted author.

I wonder how many of us could fit into a new domestic system and become no-collar workers. That is, work at home and avoid motor trips to the office. A science writer can do it and a novelist can do it. How about a reporter?

Actually, many big-time reporters who have big-time beats, like the Buffalo Bills and the White House, never go to the office. Assignments and stories are traded electronically. Reporters can live in the field and sleep in the locker room to keep abreast and keep readers abreast.

It’s done every day, but I’m not sure I can sell the idea at a community newspaper, or if I want to. It would be possible to get the Niagara County sheriff’s reports at home. Cooperative city cops can make the police blotter available. Town board agendas can be faxed and e-mailed.

It doesn’t make any difference if phone calls are made from home or the office. Certainly, some of the job can be done at home.

However, an old-timer once told me, “All the stuff you get on the phone is bull.” That’s not entirely true — I was talking to him on the phone. A reporter can get lots of information just by dialing out.

The bigger problem is that a reporter could get in the habit of staying home and miss meeting people. That’s one of the joys of the job.

A stay-at-home would miss the sight of the DeWitt Clinton Chorus singing and acting out “Side by Side” at the Lockport Relay for Life; looking up and the Upside-down Bridge in the Erie Canal; seeing the bathing beauties bravely taking a Polar Bear dip in icy Lake Ontario.

Being a man of moderation, perhaps just one no-collar day out of five days would work. I’ll suggest it on e-mail.

Contact reporter Bill Wolcott

439-9222, ext. 6246.

        

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