blue collar/white collar friends

also feel free to argue the distinction between white collar and blue collar jobs

also lol I ignored the service industry, oops

out of my close friends, one is a waiter, one owns a bar, everyone else is a waiter/bartender/hair stylist/'personal assistant'

I guess the latter are blue collar? Personal assistant doesn't get paid shit.

mean one is a teacher, not one waiter

according to Wikipedia, the service industry is entirely distinct from the white collar/blue collar division

yeah have no idea how to categorize friends who are veterinarians, unemployed, freelance tech geeks, gov't employees, teachers, film editors, etc.

do they get their hands dirty or not, is all that matters.

vets/civil service/teachers/editors = white-collar IMO

all or most of my friends are probably students and white collar waiting to happen

is it odd that I work in construction, but don't know anyone who works in a trade outside of my job?

guess everyone I know is white collar then

My friends are mostly bums, tbh

musicians, in other words.

I'm having trouble with ppl like mechanical engineers; if you are running an assembly line and designing/selecting the equipment on it, are you white collar or blue collar?

engineer=white collar
train engineer=blue collar

All of my friends are either college students or retirees.

I do wish there was an "all of my friends are unemployed" option, because that's probably the closest to the truth right now.

xxp - running the assembly = management = white-collar IMO

but I'm a goddamned commie bastard

i guess white collar, though most of my friends wear t-shirts to work.

this is a harder question to answer in 2010 than it was in 1985 or 1960!

It's pretty skewed in favour of white collar, and the blue collar guys are mostly my husband's friends. I am from a v. working class background, and I've no idea how this happened, other than that I didn't stay friends with schoolfriends so am surrounded by people from university and, er, ILX, neither of which are exactly hotbeds of blue collardom.

yeah, I come from a family of bus drivers, nurses, railroad workers, beauticians, and retail workers - yet almost all of my friends are educated and work at desks.

A ridiculously high percentage of my friends are college professors.

City bus driver seems like one of the hardest jobs in the world. I mean, I worked in an ice cream truck & having to see/anticipate people standing around & stopping for them was surprisingly difficult to nail down. And I didn't have to follow any route or stay on a schedule. Plus they have to deal w/all the world's peepants crazies.

I know someone who drives a cab, but it's a night job while he's in school. Another friend is a proud ironworkers' union member or something, but he's some weird kind of NYC-native Renaissance man who collects Broadway playbills, opera scores, and all kinds of historical ephemera AND reads voraciously AND reports to the union hall at 5.30AM for work.

In fact he's an amazing guy, but he def is not a typical blue-collar anything.

I mean, I worked in an ice cream truck

Abbott you are full of surprises

I am officially a blue-collar worker. For about a decade I was officially white-collar. Before that, blue-collar again. I am deeply conflicted.

I cannot recommend the job of "ice cream truck driver," glamorous as it naturally sounds.

you'd think it would be totally awesome, but all the ice cream truck drivers I ever knew (Abbott excepted of course) were like creepy fat white guys w/meth problems...

well I guess I know that hipster anarchist ice cream truck guy too (he gives it away for free!)

plenty of "pink collar" and service industry folx, but no blue collar friends at all.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_f22CuCnXNoE/SmSDflUfIvI/AAAAAAAACs0/DhslhUaKe1w/s400/friedman+comic+shop.jpg
ice cream truck drivers mostly variations of above comic book store owners in my experience

It was crazy, I had to avoid the territory of the other ice cream truck owner in town, Scary Larry. He sold ice cream under the name of Scary Larry (who I naturally imagined as Ron Howard's brother's character in "Ice Cream Man"). The guy I was working for had Bible chapter & verse references on his truck (I never looked them up but they were from Leviticus, which made me...worried).

The guy I worked for was worried about hiring me bcz of my gender. "Does anyone ever say 'ice cream GIRL'? No, they always say 'ice cream man.'" But my something about my willingness to be paid under the table at less than minimum wage allowed me to break the glass ceiling that has stopped so many women from selling ice cream bars throughout history.

all of my friends wear a roman collar

who I naturally imagined as Ron Howard's brother's character in "Ice Cream Man")

lolz was just google image-searching for that movie poster

something about my willingness to be paid under the table at less than minimum wage allowed me to break the glass ceiling

more like a glass floor amirite

oh zing

this is a harder question to answer in 2010 than it was in 1985 or 1960!

u old

my friends are un and underemployed recent college grads

do service/retail jobs count as blue collar?

Those are what we call 'name tag' jobs (whether worn or not).

Wikipedia says service industry jobs are neither white collar nor black collar, so I don't know.

What's black collar?

but being that the service sector makes up the biggest % of our gdp, I don't think it's a lol oops moment, more something that makes this question unanswerable

morticians

green collar jobs

poop colored collar

collard greens

Well, I'm an editor and my husband's a firefighter, and the majority of our friends in this area are people we met through work, so it's quite an even split. But I think if we count our out-of-town, but emotionally closer, friends, I think more are white collar.

I kind of think this terminology is outdated, at least in terms of class connotations. I know people who work at Starbucks, don't have a college degree, and get paid poorly to do manual labor, but they are not "blue collar." People in certain trades are well educated and earn a very good salary, and they are "blue collar." So what constitutes the color of the collar? Sitting at a desk? Using your hands to make a living?

I think that like class-distinctions, it has little to do with money but more with perception of job skills.

ie, I have a friend who works in construction and lives in a mansion in the most elite neighborhood of SF. Most of my white-collar friends would gnaw through their cube-offices and aeron chairs to live such a lifestyle.

The large part of my mother's family that are still agrarian farmers live in homes the size of the city block I live on, on farms the size of my neighborhood.

But to make things confusing, I have a white collar job focused on the manufacturing of blue collar apparel and I have never once worn a white collar shirt to work while in this industry.

according to Wikipedia, the service industry is entirely distinct from the white collar/blue collar division

― Bunsen burner, bubbles, IT'S ALIVE! whaaaaa-? (HI DERE), Monday, March 1, 2010 7:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

me and bros in hospitality used to say "dirty white collar"

Using your hands to make a living?

This has always been the rough definition. To what extent you put service people (who make a living by carrying food, or w/e) is the modern dilemma.

i went with "most are white collar," but otoh i do know plumbers, carpenters, hair stylists, bartenders -- and i mean socially, not as a client. more of them in tennessee than nyc, not surprisingly -- in some ways smaller cities can have more diverse social pools. one nice thing about moving back to knoxville for me is almost anything i need done -- from yard work to painting to plumbing -- i'll be able hire a friend to do it.

to earn a living, i use my hands, on keyboard and mouse

it's possible that this distinction is going to get eroded significantly by wage compression. there are already plenty of plumbers making more money than a lot of college grads.

This poll assumes you have friends.

..

my friends are un and underemployed recent college grads

majority of ppl I know have bad employment situations for whatever reason, ilx feels v.supplement-savvy by comparison

unemployed
mature student
unemployed
customer sales rep
unemployed musician
real estate

my friends are all brohemian

Postgraduate researcher
IT Manager for investment firm
Public servant (IT)
Public servant (clerical)
Mechanic
Shop assistant
Shop assistant
Student

Three dudes earn - mechanic (house bought and paid for by the time the rest of us had finished college)and the IT guys. Apart from the working hours I'm about equal with the shop assistants.

I always understood the diff between blue- and white-collar as: do you labor, or do you command the labor of others?

Scratch the surface of that and you find all kinds of interesting ideas about male worth, but that's a bit much at 9am.

I labour, but I labour with my fingers on a keyboard.

you can't even really put "teachers" in the same category if you're using salary as a determinant; i am a teacher and my base salary is <40K. i teach at a school that serves poor people. my friend makes just under 100K and she works at the richest high school in the country. they have a nutritionist dedicated just to the teachers! a nutritionist!

yeah but is the nutritionist blue collar or not? focus, pls, focus.

no, s/he probably has her own personal nutritionist.

Plumbers make X comparisons are pretty questionable, IMO. Construction trades make less than a lot of y'all seem to thing. With a ton of experience and striking out on their own, they can do well. But the median trades incomes come in below starting teacher salaries for the most part.

I think it's a matter of slow and steady vs. wild fluctuations with the dream of hitting it big. I was reading an article about the huge shortage of workers for blue collar jobs (electrical line repair in specific) in WA state because all the kids just want to get that mythical Amazon or Microsoft job because someday just maybe they'll have a huge payoff. Over the first couple years as a lineman you'd work your way up to something like 80k a year but then it stops and you're capped at that point.

I remember hearing that lifeguards here can make pretty decent coin (I guess the equivalent of a 40-50k job in the UK) with fixed hours, offtime in the winter, all for just watching a bunch of people swim, etc. but you're capped at that salary for the rest of your career.

Yeah I'm not sure how to vote here. Quite a few of my friends alternate white collar, blue collar, and service industry depending on what's available or whatever other factors. Note that white collar in this case is sort of the lower end of white collar (miscellaneous desk jobs, IT, that sort of thing). Then the artists and musicians who hardly fit into this schema at all. Hmmm.

hemp collar?

paisley collar

I guess this question boils down to whether what you do for work translates/influences your personality as a person/friend/s.o etc.

unless you collect blue collar friends like pitchofrk 9.0 albums for your itunes

Ha ha hemp collar. I wish I had some pot.

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I come from a very b.collar family (steel workers in my father's side; mother's side is mostly longshoremen), but all my friends are white collar. Just kind of happened as I got older, graduated college, etc.

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