Blue-Collar Brilliance - Essay Example

Blue-Collar Brilliance Essay

When elections are around the corner, politicians will inevitably start uttering the usual phrases as they try to win a certain demographic. One such demographic is the working class; people who engage in manual work to pay their living expenses, almost always at an hourly rate. This labor can be either skilled or unskilled, but it is always the foundation for any society if it wants to run smoothly. The division between such workers and the middle class has been the main driver of social tension since the invention of the printing press. Moreover, as formal education protracted over time, the length of it itself became a status signal.

Influential ideologues like Karl Marx portrayed the working class as those who do not own the means of production but are generating all the wealth. Throughout history, if anything could be attributed as the engine of political movements, it is the dynamics between economic classes. Some would claim this division is directly linked to biological division in intelligence; nonetheless, massive societal upheavals and countless deaths resulted in such movements exploiting these divisions. Therefore, it would be prudent to keep things in perspective, unless we want a repeat of history.

The work done by the working class is usually referred to as blue-collar jobs, named after trade jobs in Iowan newspaper, Alden, in which workers wore blue denim shirts as their uniforms.

Today, blue-collar workers are viewed as having a lower social status. For the last few decades, there has been a consistent push to get as many people into colleges as possible. Instead of making high schools and trade schools relevant for employment and high living standards, the government turned colleges into new high schools. To counter this misguided social signaling, author Mike Rose argues in his “Blue-Collar Brilliance Essay” that blue-collar workers should be viewed as exemplars of skill, intuition, professionalism, and knowledge. In no uncertain terms, Rose constructs a compelling argument that the artificiality of education should not become a metric for one’s value and respect.

Mike Rose paints a vivid picture of what blue-collar workers are like. They are far removed from the Hollywood depiction of the working class, as someone who punches a card when arriving at work and mindlessly drones on until the shift ends. On the contrary, “Blue-Collar Brilliance” explains what is involved in the immediate physical working environment. Such work requires:

• communication skills
• technological skills
• organization skills
• intelligence
• quick reaction times to solve problems coming out from the left field.

Mike’s own experience, as a child of a working mother employed at various coffee shops, is colored by an appreciation for the intense mental and physical requirements of manual work. Her skills were plain for all to see, yet without credentialist recognition. Waiting tables is one of the most common blue-collar jobs with a fairly low barrier to entry. Nonetheless, a good waiter must develop mnemonic strategies to quickly and reliably take orders, while also maintaining a pleasant and welcoming demeanor. This requires a respectable level of intelligence. On top of that, Mike’s mother strove to meet customer needs on a psychological level, which made her skillful at observing people’s behavior and body language.

Accordingly, Mike argues that, if we want to have an accurate reflection of people's value, education itself does not accurately reflect one’s intelligence because education, as passive absorption and regurgitation of information, can be overshadowed by skills blue-collar workers have to develop just to be able to do their jobs competently. This is made clear by Mike’s following statement, “Carpenters have an eye for length, line, and angle; mechanics troubleshoot by listening; hair stylists are attuned to shape, texture, and motion’.

In essence, manual workers must have the intelligence to develop a wide range of motor and mental skills, in addition to increased focus and discipline. Additionally, skills in reading comprehension also grow as many physical and intelligence tasks require proper comprehension of tools and workflows. In the age when credentialism is a big determinant of social status, Mike Rose argues that we should not lose perspective that physical labor workers form the infrastructure for all other jobs and leisure to be possible. Without the daily grind of manual work, the entire society is at risk of collapse, as the recent COVID-19 pandemic crisis illustrated. Even unprecedented financial injections had little effect when the core engine of society is ground to a halt – blue-collar jobs.

Unlike Bryan Caplan, who in his book, “The Case Against Education”, argues that the entire system of education needs to be overhauled, Mike Rose maintains his belief that formal education is important. However, we should not put significantly greater emphasis on formal education over the education one receives from working at blue-collar jobs. Such work many skills that require a greater degree of mental acuity and physical coordination than many academic professions. It is no secret that many academic fields are ultimately a result of leisure, leisure made possible by diligent blue-collar workers. With the massive inflation of college courses in the last three decades, this has never been plainer to see.

As automation is endangering the existence of many blue-collar and white-collar jobs, it would wise to remind ourselves that machine learning is a far greater threat to white-collar workers than blue-collar ones. White-collar work and skills revolve around mental tasks, which can easily be deconstructed, quantified, replicated, and given to the unsubstantial digital hands of AI bots. This has been happening at a rapid pace, from news generation, accounting, contract-forming, cloud-computing, translation, code generation, etc. AI algorithms are infinitely reproducible and, therefore, can always supplant a mental task cheaply or at no cost at all.

This will not be the case with blue-collar jobs – the domain of manual workers with their less formalized skills. Outside of preset assembly lines, robots that can handle most physical work are still far removed from a competent blue-collar worker. And even if they were equally competent at performing physical tasks, robotic work will always be exceedingly more costly to implement than a simple application of machine learning to replace white-collar intellectual work.

As college education outside the STEM program become further devalued and dept-crippled, blue-collar jobs stemming from trade schools will be more valued and more relevant in the coming years. Their skills and intelligence will be more appreciated by society at large. As a result, we will likely witness the inversion of social status signaling and a shift within the education system, with blue-collar workers having a more consistent income as they successfully evade the trap of incurring college debt for little to no gain.

Resources Used

Graff, Gerald, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel K. Durst. “Blue Collar Brilliance.”