This post on Charlie’s Blog about blue collar jobs versus white collar jobs got me thinking (I love that!) about working classes and the stereotypes.
Somewhere in a high rise office is an executive.
He quaffs a Scotch and loosens his tie. He has risen far in the company, but he can’t tell you exactly what it is that he does.
He doesn’t know from one day to the next if he will be promoted, forgotten, or terminated. All his coworkers are enemies looking to plunge a dagger in his back at the first opportunity. He maintains the facade, but he hates his job. The perks are nice, but he realizes they are merely sugar on shit.
He gazes at a building under construction and sees iron workers putting together rebar.
They don’t even make a third of what he makes, but he envies them. Without men such as this, his office would not exist. There would be no chair to sit in or desk to write on. It is men such as these that make the world work.
They make the world livable. They deal with iron and concrete. What they do matters.
His PowerPoint from a month ago is now ancient corporate history. The company is paying a consulting outfit $250K to help craft a new mission statement. 250 smackers to write a goddamn sentence. Madness.
The above rant of Charlie’s is very Office Space when Ron (at the end) finally ends up getting an “honest” construction job where he just clocks in his time, works, comes home, has a beer and relaxes.
Compared to his other white collar former colleagues, they’re stuck in an office, stressed out, working on weekends and trying to figure out a stupid printer’s settings.
In case you are unfamiliar with the terms:
Blue Collar: Manual Labour
- Line cooks
- Construction workers
- Street sweepers
- Mechanics
- Repairmen
- Cleaners (maids, office cleaners)
- Factory workers
- Plumbers
- Electricians
White Collar: Salaried Professionals
- Office dwellers
- Accountants
- Bankers
- Consultants
- Teachers
By all rights, I am in the white collar category as a consultant, but that doesn’t mean I look down on blue collar workers, the way some might expect.
I just happen to like doing what I do, and it is classified as “white collar” work.
I have a great respect for people on the front line (the blue collar jobs), and just recently I had a conversation with a colleague that went like this:
FB: Well it’s just frustrating that I can’t get the information I need from them [factory workers]. I need those stats.
Colleague: *whispers* Well they’re blue collar workers, so you know, they aren’t professionals. You can’t expect too much out of them.
FB: *blinks* Well I think it’s just a question of them not knowing how to get the information, seeing as it isn’t readily available. I mean, they don’t time themselves or record that stuff, so they can’t give me what’s not there.
Colleague: That’s what I mean. They weren’t bright enough to even record that stuff in the first place.
FB: How could they have guessed? Never mind. I’ll find the info another way.
If you weren’t taught how to do something like fix a car, you wouldn’t be expected to know how to do it off the bat!
So why would you expect someone to know o record what bits of information seeing as they don’t know what someone in my job might need?
I couldn’t do their jobs — manual labour that is. Putting cars together on the line is no easy task. I saw how hard they grunt and sweat, and at the end they can see a row of shiny cars for their efforts.
SO WHY DO BLUE COLLAR JOBS GET A BAD RAP?
Because it’s manual labour. People think that working on a spreadsheet is far better than working on a machine as a job.
They think they make more money than someone getting dirty and fixing a car, and it is more ‘prestigious’ to say you work at So-and-So, than saying you’re a mechanic.
This is where I have a story: I know a woman who cleans stores at night and makes $150,000 a year.
She works for 3-4 hours of the 8 that she is there, and she isn’t let out of the store until the next morning by the manager.
By all rights, she’s a blue collar worker, but the difference between her and some of my friends with fancy titles is:
- she loves her job — she actually gets a kick out of cleaning
- she works by the job, not by the hour, so if it takes 4 hours, it takes 4 hours
- she makes double what my analyst friends make
Blue collar jobs are seen as dirty, disgusting and unattractive to white collar workers… but there can be a lot of satisfaction in doing a basic task with your hands.
I like to cook, so seeing (and eating!) the end result is satisfying, so I can understand when you fix up an old car to make it run, how satisfying it must be to hear the purr.
SIMILARLY, WHY DO WHITE COLLAR JOBS GET A BAD RAP?
White collar jobs are seen as lifeless, dull, drone-like sets of tasks and responsibilities.
- Clean up that spreadsheet.
- Make a powerpoint presentation.
- Go through these numbers and find a trend.
“Yawn”, right?
Where I think white collar jobs get a bad rap from blue collar workers who thinks that they don’t do anything. The spreadsheets, the organization, the presentations for a mission statement for a company — it all seems like fluffy BS, doesn’t it?
This is where I think my bias comes in.
What I do matters, even if I don’t deal in iron and concrete.
I think that as a white collar worker, I can see that if I didn’t organize statistics into spreadsheets, the factory workers would never know that they were wasting 15% of their raw materials just by not having the right timing down for the factory to run at an optimal speed.
Or that they can shave an hour off their workday just by having a process to enter information in an efficient manner, as not to waste time re-calculating and erasing numbers to get to the end result.
What I do can have a real impact on the front lines. Not always, but sometimes it makes their lives so much easier.
Someone in accounting would set up analyses and have presentations to say “Yes, go ahead with building that new factory, it is worth it“, and then blue collar workers come in with their iron and concrete.
If they said “No, wait a year or two, or never“, there would be no building. No blue collared workers. No jobs. No work.
Everything is intertwined, and no one job can say that one or another is worthless or not as “real”.
There is a lot of merit in white collar jobs, and I have never felt like I don’t do anything, although I have said to myself: I can’t believe I get paid to do this! 😀
This is all because I love my job and I’m good at it. I’m passionate about seeing things done right, saving people time and money and helping them do their jobs better on the front line.
It can be easy to brush off a mission statement, but sometimes remembering why you started a company can help bring your future vision back on the right track so you make the right decisions and can create more jobs for both white and blue collared workers.
Blue collared jobs do the work on the front line, and without them, there is no company. They do the work, they get the job done, and they are the ones who are considered ‘valuable resources’.
White collared jobs create and improve blue collared jobs. The more a company sells, the more money it has, and the more people they can hire to expand the business. You also need white collared workers to keep a company running — accounting, selling, buying, organizing projects, hiring resources; there is a lot more to a working company than just the job itself or the building it’s in.
It is very symbiotic, not parasitic.
Just a girl trying to find a balance between being a Shopaholic and a Saver.
I cleared $60,000 in 18 months earning $65,000 gross/year.
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There is a great article from Mike Rowe about blue collar work, and statistically white collars are only making about $1,000 more a year than tradesman. On top of that, there usually isn’t debt required to get into the trades. As a welder I make around $5,500 a month, have full medical for my whole family for an extremely good rate, and my wife doesn’t have to work and can stay home with our child. Also, assuming that you have poor communication skills because you are blue collar is ridiculous. You can be a very intelligent person, and choose to work with your hands. In fact, I choose to work with my hands because I find it unwise to spend thousands of dollars to go to school, and end up not even being able to get a job in this terrible economy. I don’t want to owe anybody. There was a time when most men did blue collar work, now the schools tell you that your a nobody unless you get a college degree. That’s easy to say when your on the recieving end of a hefty tuition.
try being a college graduate working in retail as a courtesy clerk. all i do is push carts, bag groceries, and clean up customers crap for 6 hours a day. talk about boring, repetitive, and unmotivating.
This sounds to be a great post in regards to career and jobs.
If I had a kid college age, I would tell him to learn plumbing or HVAC or roofing and then I would tell him to take several business classes. Then I would suggest he start his own business. Someone who is good at one of those things and who can also run a business will always have work that cannot be outsourced. I was an English major and loved college, but one can always take history and English and political science classes one at a time just for fun. Having your own business and not worrying about the next round of layoffs would be invaluable.
Definitely with you on viewing the symbiotic relationship. I’m in a white collar job (engineer) but it’s in product development, meaning I get to see the tangible results of what I design. That is pretty great. My girlfriend’s father is in a blue collar job but is extremely smart and mechanically minded. I swear that man could tell you how anything works just by looking at it for two minutes. He definitely has the “engine” part of “engineer” covered far better than I do.
The world no longer has a strict class status system like it once used to but we still have a class system just a more relaxed one, at least in the U.S. I know that in countries like India its more strict. These days its usually limited by education and how much of it you have. I don’t want to be rude but its obvious that some people are idiots.
Some idiots go to college and coast and get their degree. My grandfather didn’t get a degree but he was a smart man. Anyway my point is that education is more than just having a degree. Sometimes smart people don’t want to go to college, people get tired of studying for tests, instead they have small businesses, they go into a trade, or they just self-educate. I dare anyone to call Bill Gates or Mark Z from Facebook, “uneducated.”
However I can’t stand blue collar jobs. I’ve done a cleaning job (lasted 4 days), fast food, and retail. Its not my thing. I want to finish college, work for an employer for 2-4 years and then quit. My plan is to be an entrepreneur or to freelance.
http://charliebroadway.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-it-sucks-to-be-white-collar.html
Interesting post!
When I lived in the U.S., I noticed a lot of tensions between blue collar and white collar workers. I have several friends who are teachers, and I would hate it when I’d read a newspaper article or hear someone say, “Teachers only work nine months out of the year, and they’re done by 2 pm.” Um, no! Most teachers I know spend their summers taking classes and work well beyond their 8-hour day. I also dislike the phrase, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” /rant 🙂
I used to tell all the employees at my last the job the same thing. You don’t know what it’s like until you stand in that other person’s shoes.
When the salesmen would bitch about the warehouse guys taking so long to pull their loads, I’d tell the salesmen to go inside and help.
When the warehouse would bitch about the girls taking too long with their paperwork, I’d tell them to go upstairs and newer phones so the girls wouldn’t be distracted.
When the girls would bitch about how long it would take the warehouse guys to unload a container, I’d tell them to go downstairs and haul out 1400 cs of 70#+ boxes of meat.
Needless to say, none of them wanted to do that other job they were bitching about. I literally have done all the jobs – warehouse, unloading container, talking up customers, taking orders, working with spreadsheets – and it was my goal to make them all see that each position was hard, and without one, they couldn’t have the other. And to stop bitching.
well stated..my DH’s job is kind of in-between these two polarities. He’s an engineer by training and does consulting and training of others as a big part of his job (i.e., clean office work), but he also installs specialty equipment (dirty, sweaty, manual labour with meticulous specs to be followed). He comments that he gets little respect from the white collar folks when he’s done an install and looks a fright (i.e., filthy hands, dirty jeans, etc.) but gets little respect from the blue collar workers he trains until he fills them in on his background (i.e., that he used to be a blue collar guy himself and that he still gets his hands dirty on a regular basis). He is happy to have this balance in his job, as he would be unhappy doing the dirty work 100% of the time, but hates the idea of being “chained to a desk” all the time too.
As a white collar worker myself who works with a lot of former blue collar workers (helping them figure out new careers following injuries), I’m impressed at the skill set many of them have. I could never do their jobs! It’s too bad that people’ assume that people in trades are not as smart (i.e., they didnt go to university because they couldn’t get in or hack the academics) or that white collar workers are lazy (as many of us work hard in different ways). I’m glad that people have different things they enjoy and different skill sets, because if we all wanted the same jobs, there are a lot of things that would go undone.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. My boyfriend is an aeronautics engineering technician, and I see the attention to detail, expertise in composite materials & dexterity it requires to excel at his job – I couldn’t hold a teeny tiny screwdriver and assemble things for aircraft doors with a magnifying glass – I don’t have the patience to do that job meticulously. I’m constantly in awe that when he builds things or repairs things around the house he’s able to do it so well, when some people look down on his job as a “grease monkey” type job.
On the other hand, some people look down on the “white collar” type of job that I have (I’m a marketing analyst) and dismiss my job as being paid to do nothing but look at spreadsheets and drinking coffee while I sit pretty at my desk – but a lot of people don’t realize that this kind of work requires a different kind of meticulousness and skill set that doesn’t really show externally.
I get the same type of comments about my marketing job. One of my best friends came to see me at work once and said “I don’t know what the f*ck you people do”. He then later found his career turn more in the same direction and had the gall to tell me how much he’d learned from me. I guess we marketers have skills after all.
Hear, hear 🙂
People think marketers just spew a ton of pep talk and slogans and do nothing all day, but our job requires us to think a lot and come up with solutions… Also, in a small company, marketers work like jacks-of-all-trades, and I can say that I learned a lot more as a marketer than I did as a university student.