The Rising Value of Blue Collar Workers

Do you know anyone who was born in 1924? I only ask because if you do that person is 100 years old this year. It's possible. I know some people who are in their 80s. They were born in the 1940s during WW2 havoc. Isn't that bizarre? That while the whole world was blowing each other up, people still had babies? I guess they found some time for hanky panky in between hiding from the bomb explosions. This seems like a weird intro doesn't it? How is anything I just wrote connected to Blue Collar Work? You'll see. Just let me warm up.

I want you to get a picture in your mind of the past century of people (the workforce) in the United States. What do they look like to you? We're not talking about the old south when Scarlet O'Hara was bringing lemonade to the farm hands or asking Mammy to go fan off one of her sisters. That was much much further down on the timeline than the past century. We are talking about 1924 to 2024 - from the time of flappers and the Great Gatbsy and the Stock Market Crash to the time of cell phone addicts and Fifty Shades of Grey and the first black U.S. President. I want you to really try to see an American worker for the past 100 years. Do you have an image in mind or is it to difficult to grasp? It should be difficult and that's my point. Because this past century has evolved the American worker faster than any other century before it. In fact, if you're my age (50 somethings) we have seen the most dramatic changes in the workforce over any other previous workforce in America and probably globally. We haven't seen this much change since Moses freed the slaves from Egypt.

Let me give you the evolution of the workforce for the past century as it looks to my mind based on what my family told me, what I learned in school, and what I personally experienced the past 50 years. 100 years ago, before WW1 and WW2, F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to document in his famous novels what America looked like and felt like to him. Not having been around at that time, I get the feeling from the history books and literature written that it was a lot like the movie Titanic -- with the wealthy in first class seats and the very poor (before welfare was established) begging for crumbs. The workforce also had a divisive system. Those with talent could wear nice clothes and entertain the wealthy. Those with no skills were lucky if they could cook or clean for them. The only middle class in America that existed before WW2 happened were the farmers who had their own land. Besides them, you were either dirt poor or like Gatsby.

Changes started happening during WW2 in the 1940s when factories started mass productions. In Michigan, the automobile industry provided jobs to people who would work in their factories. In other states, other factories of mass production also provided work to the poor, unskilled, uneducated people. They (the human resources) were also labelled just like the products that were being manufactured: Blue Collar Workers.

What is that phrase? What does it mean to be a "Blue Collar Worker"? The phrase was first "coined" in an Iowa newspaper in 1924 and refers to the color of denim pants, typically blue, and often worn by trade laborers especially at that time. It was to contrast the "White Collar Worker" which was referencing the upper class employment dress style where white shirts were often worn by office workers. Later other phrases like "suits" and "yuppies" were employed to describe "White Collar Workers" to soften the perception as it began to sting with a negative connotation. When Bruce Springsteen wore his white t-shirt and blue jeans and howled "Born in the U.S.A." in the late 80s, many people knew it was time to change the paradigm with newly sweetened terminology. Don't say "White Collar", say "Suit"... Don't say Black, say African American.... Don't say unskilled, say uneducated. Yeah, they sugar coated the past 35 years with the dictionary of "politically correct" language and now the millenials think they're all "White Collar Criminals" because they can get a free Big Mac with their Iphone app.

But let me back up again and go back to the timeline. After WW2 most "Blue Collar Workers" were either in a factory or doing some other manual labor job like construction, driving trucks, fishing, or repair work on cars and housing. Some women held these jobs, but mostly these jobs were dominated by men. Not because they couldn't obtain an education and not because they lacked the skills to work in an office. Simply because they had the "manpower" and I'm not talking about human resources. I am specifically stating that those jobs were dominated by men because they were physically more capable of handling those jobs. It's the same reason that they won't allow women to play football with men. The workforce has changed and evolved over the past century, but physics is physics. Men's bodies and women's bodies have always been different and that's a fact no matter how much sugar you want to coat it with. A farming couple (like the one depicted in the famous painting American Gothic by Grant Wood) of American history was not going to sugar coat how the man and woman ran the farm. It was typically not a woman pushing the tractor or dealing with the horses and cattle. That's where they dubbed the phrase "A Woman's place is in the house." No God Fearing Farmer Man was going to have his mother or his wife die under a tractor or trampled in a stampede. He was going to handle the hard labor and danger, while she kept the house nice and clean and a haven for him to relax in once the work was done. It's old fashioned thinking, antiquated or outdated to modern feminists, yet that's where it all began. On the farms - the first of the middle class Americans.

This theme (Men Work, Women Stay Home) became the major narrative of the 50s when a man knew he was a success by having a house, a car, and a television. Hey buddy, your wife and kids are monsters, but you're a success because you get to drive home from the factory in your new Chevy Bel Air and watch tv before bedtime. In the meantime, the wives and mothers were having their own meetings staying overtime after PTA meetings. Discussing their unhappiness and the inequality they felt was imposed upon them as they felt trapped to "stay home". Enough meetings and bitch fests occurred and soon enough you had women burning their bras and filing for divorce in the 60s. They didn't need a man and they didn't want a husband. They could get jobs at McDonalds. They could earn their own money without having to build a house or drive cattle.

And so as the Civil Rights Movement and Women's Equality defined the 1960s, I was about to be born in 1971 at the end of President Nixon's term. Television had introduced the horrors of war to the masses as people watched the bodies hit the ground in Vietnam footage. Hippies decided they didn't want to be any part of that war overseas or the feudal economic wars occuring somewhere between McDonalds, a poor farmer in Iowa, and a Stock Broker on Wall Street in New York City. Where was all this going? What was happening to the American workforce?

I could begin like David Copperfield - I was born. Ok, I will. Yes, I was born in 1971, 53 years ago, in New Jersey. I was raised by white European Americans. I went to public school. We moved to Florida in 1983. My mother was a "white collared worker" and was taking home 40k per year in a time when minimum wage was only $3 per hour. She bought a house at that same time because a brand new suburban 3 bedroom house sold for 50k, at that time. She had her own version of the Chevy Bel Air, a convertible Ford Mustang. And I was her protege - the young white daughter who would benefit from this great feminist and all she had accomplished.

It was a nice dream. But it turned into another American Horror Story like most of them do. When I took my first job at the age of 15 for Burger King, I earned $3.50 per hour. That was in 1986. Today in 2024, the same worker doing the same work earns $12 per hour. My pay back then wasn't enough to pay rent or buy a house. Neither is $12 per hour. Some things have changed, and some things have not.

Gone are the factories in Michigan and New Jersey. Robots and machines replaced the human resources. Gone are the small farms that could not survive despite all the benefit concerts of the 80s like Farm Aid. Gone is the middle class, where one man's salary could support a wife and 2.5 kids. Gone is the middle class for blacks, whites, men, and women. That's the end of the century's timeline and the conclusion of what happened to the American workforce. The machines took our jobs. It doesn't matter if your skilled or educated. It doesn't matter if you're black or white. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. The machines can do it better than you for a lot less money. If you hear of anyone speaking of "Blue Collar Workers" today, they are mostly talking about the people who are still working at the restaurants or taking any part time gig that comes up, the way the hippies used to in the 60s. If you hear of anyone speaking of "White Collar" they are mostly talking about politicians or clergymen. That's all folks. Our kids don't have to work anymore. The robots insured that slavery will never return. It didn't cost us much. Just the end of the American dream.