You could call Joe the Plumber, for example.

And it was quite fascinating, because you know the guy his name was Joey Grimaldi he impersonated the Moorish general you know, for the first three minutes he was really that general, and then he went back into plumber, he worked as a plumber, so plumber, general, plumber, general so for three dollars, I saw two tragedies for the price of one.

We might divide it the plumber would say, Well, where's the water?

If there's a plumber, he's 300 pounds and he's got a giant butt crack. Admit it.

2.1 The authors worked as a plumber, bus driver and locksmith, respectively, for the municipal authority in Alcantarilla, Murcia.

They call him The Plumber in Italy, as well as Maestro, because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time.

Intra European competition in services is restricted by innumerable national regulations that, for instance, strictly determine the requirements for becoming a hairdresser or a plumber. One of the defining features of the past decades is the sharp increase in services productivity in the US none of that happened in Europe.

Italy has long had a large Communist Party, and the left may be in power again but there is no gut antagonism to the freedoms that capitalism encourages. Poland is another country in which individual initiative flourishes to the point that the apocryphal Polish plumber came to epitomize the threats posed by globalization in France.

During the referendum campaign in France preceding the vote on the draft EU Constitutional Treaty, the proposed directive was vilified as undermining the rights of labor, symbolized by that dreaded bogeyman, the Polish plumber. These attacks overlooked the fact that the directive makes employment conditions of workers from other EU member states subject in most respects to host country rules.

But many commentators believe that they were protesting against what they perceived as the precipitate admission of ten new member states, mainly much poorer countries from Central and Eastern Europe. In particular, voters were afraid that their jobs would be lost to hordes of Eastern immigrants, exemplified in the image widely quoted at the time, of the low cost Polish plumber.

While it catalyzes a more generalized demand the elderly plumber who works longer hours in the boom spends more on his stamp collection it is not unreasonable to believe that much of debt fueled demand is more focused. So, as lending dries up, borrowing households can no longer spend, and demand for certain goods changes disproportionately, especially in areas that boomed earlier.

For example, during the referendum campaign in France for the European constitution, the Polish plumber became a symbol of the threat that European integration was supposed to pose to French workers standards of living. But the impact of free migration (when allowed) on French plumbers incomes is in fact minimal, not least because of the smallness of the new member states compared to the whole of Western Europe.

What makes the debate so passionate in 2005 is a new fear that did not exist in the 1980 s that the new members have a different social model, in which workers rights and the welfare state will be eroded. It is not so much the Polish plumber as it is the Slovak 19 flat tax that is the challenge to the older West European social model and welfare state.