For about seven years after college, I worked for a company that was active in the agricultural irrigation engineering sphere, and I had a “white-collar” job in a research lab. The company was a startup, and so I made only about $42k/yr, but I was really passionate about the company mission, and the position itself afforded me a ton of PTO and schedule flexibility; I also built a lot of great management experience, and expertise regarding designing experiments and supervising a research team in a corporate setting.
In my white-collar job (again, paid ~42k), I was expected to self-supervise, manage a remote research office as the most senior onsite employee, and I had a corporate credit card that I was trusted to use for everything from purchasing new experimental components to airline tickets for business trips. My boss was super supportive, but hands-off regarding day-to-day business, and really just made sure my team had everything we needed to make steady progress. After seven years, the company was sold, and my services were no longer needed, as the company that bought us didn’t wish to continue with the R&D side of things…
I was on unemployment for six weeks before landing a new, “blue-collar” job in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, and I am appalled by a couple of apparent differences between white-collar and blue-collar working life… I took this job because the pay was literally almost double what I was making before, and I was being offered a semi-senior position that almost never gets filled with external candidates. Also, the benefits are to die for (think great insurance, eye, dental, 401(k), disability, effing PET INSURANCE, and more, if you can believe it)…
With all that great stuff offered, why am I finding it necessary to burden you good folks, you ask? Well, as Joe Biden’s folksy daddy allegedly liked to say, because “a job is about more than just a paycheck, sport— it’s about dignity,” and that’s where blue-collar jobs seem to fall well short of their white-collar counterparts—dignity.
In my new role, I am expected to track my non-working time (think bathroom breaks) to the minute. Any mistake one person makes while working precipitates a change for everyone. Managers can treat people literally however they want, and there’s no accountability for management. Every week, our jobs become more automated, and all of the skill is being sucked out of every one of our jobs. Training for this industry is ridiculously expensive, so we don’t ever fire people, even when they have been credibly accused of assault or intoxication at work, or when they just don’t actually do any work. We’re discouraged from thinking of novel ideas, and we’re generally just spoken to like children/criminals/idiots by our supervisors, most of whom have never done our jobs before. Our professional dignity, in other words, has one foot out of the building, and the other seems headed that way.
My genuine question is why society has assumed that blue-collar workers are unintelligent/irresponsible just because many are formally uneducated at the college level. Many of my “uneducated” coworkers are some of the most astute, clever, erudite people I’ve known, and just never had the means to become educated. Many of my degree-holding former white-collar peers had no imaginations, and limited their thinking to what they had been told was possible.
TL;DR: I was white-collar and now I’m blue-collar. I make more money but they treat us like assumed children/criminals even though we’ve done nothing to validate those assumptions.
Discuss!