In 1961, the city of Newburgh, New York instituted a collection of draconian welfare policies that included forcing all recipients, who were commonly thought to be African American migrants from the South, to pick up their checks at the police station for eligibility audits to "weed out the
chisellers." (27) In 1962, U.S.
Then there's the players, a bunch of
chisellers - or 'scapegoats' as Nigel Reo-Coker put it - who basically sulked over the new arrivals for six months, got a decent manager the sack and then only pulled their fingers out once relegation was looming hideously.
For example, on hearing that his family had been allocated a house in Crumlin, Brendan Behan told his brother, Dominic, that "the
chisellers in Kimmage don't have time to play games, they have to go huntin' with their fathers.
Early in 1937, rather than introduce a property tax increase to meet the shortfall from provincial relief payments, the City of Ottawa fired 40 female social workers and replaced them with 11 male "detectives" to eliminate "
chisellers."(96) The situation for married strikers became more precarious when a detective from Ottawa's relief department visited the club house on the second day of the strike and was given a list of all registered caddies.(97) This was compared to relief rolls to determine whether they had been reporting their earnings.
The young
chisellers will find, all too soon, that life after school is considerably harsher than anything encountered in make-shift classrooms, whiffy lavatories and school halls where lurk the ghosts of long-since eaten lunches.
If anybody was guilty the entrepreneurs and
chisellers on the fight fringe were.