What Color is your Collar?

By Shlomo Maital

              What color is your collar?   

               Blue?  You do manual labor, construction, work on an assembly line, have a skilled trade.  You are one of 60 million such workers in the US.  Probably didn’t go to college.

              White?  You perform professional service, desk, managerial, or administrative work.  You are one of 70 million such workers in the US. Probably went to college.

               Neither white nor blue?   Red? (government workers).  Brown?  Military.  No collar?  Artist etc.   You are one of 37 million workers.   Total:  167 people in the labor force. 

               Money?  Believe it or not, white collar workers average about the same annual income as blue collar workers.

                So, what do blue collar workers think?  I’ve made a survey, and here is what I came up with, putting myself in their shoes:

            “I show up. Day after day. Even for a job I hate. The bills are growing much faster than what I make. My wife has to work.  It’s how we get (expensive) health insurance.  Work is getting me down.  Bosses are too young to shave and tell me what to do on the assembly line.  I see where the company is being taken over. Companies buy the government with money, political donations. Government? It tries to buy the people.  A lot of jobs have left.  A lot of new immigrants are taking whatever jobs remain.  And I pay taxes to pay for their lodging, health care, education.  Our car is old and broke.  Can’t remember when we went on vacation.  OK, I didn’t go to college. So what?  College kids are arrogant and stupid and worse, they don’t know it.  Lawyers.  They make the rules, send factories abroad, and pay themselves big bonuses.  Washington?  Cozy job for  465 lazy bums, and 100 lazier bums in the Senate – average age 94.  They pretend to hear us, every 2 years, or every 6 years, but they don’t see us, we’re transparent.  Why do we vote for a foul-mouthed billionaire? Because he says what we think, and because even though he went to college, he’s as dumb as us, and proud of it.”

….

p.s.     Nicholas Kristof,  New York Times:

    “One gauge of how many Americans are struggling is that average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a metric for blue-collar earnings, were lower in the first half of 2023 than they had been (adjusted for inflation) in the first half of 1969. That’s not a misprint.  Another: If the federal minimum wage of 1968 had kept pace with inflation and productivity, it would now be more than $25 an hour. Instead, it’s stuck at $7.25.”

     “The Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton popularized the term “deaths of despair” for the tumbling life expectancy among working-class Americans since 2010, but the tragedy goes far beyond the staggering mortality. For each person who dies from drugs, alcohol and suicide, many others are mired in addiction and heap pain on their families.   The challenges are particularly acute for Black and Native American men. Native American males have a life expectancy of only 61.5 years, shorter than men in India, Egypt and Venezuela. And the median wage of Black men in 2020 was only 55 percent of that of white men, a smaller share than it had been in the late 1960s.”