Is Blue Collar Better Than White Collar?

I had a friend who was a computer programmer for a major health insurance company. He did not like his job. He liked programming, but he did not like the corporate environment he had to work in. When he began, he said the bullshit ate up about 10% of his day. He said it had grown to over 90% of his day. He spent more time filling out reports than programming. Frustrated, he quit his job.

I can identify and empathize with someone in that situation. What blew my mind was he asked if where I was working had any openings. He was serious. It wasn't about money since he clearly made way more as a programmer. It wasn't about status since my occupation is several rungs down the ladder compared to his. He just wanted to do some sort of honest work for a change.

All of this happened before I read Shop Class as Soulcraft, so I didn't know what to tell him. I couldn't tell him that what he was feeling was alienation from the work that he did. I couldn't point him in the right direction because I didn't know it either. I just knew that I liked my job while he hated his. I thought he was nuts for quitting but not now. He went on a motorcycle tour of America for a few months and returned to work for another major health insurance company as a computer programmer. I don't know if he found happiness in his new position but at least it pays the bills.

People either have real jobs, or they have bullshit jobs. People with real jobs come home with a feeling of satisfaction. People with bullshit jobs come home in frustration and despair. Here's how Matthew Crawford put it:

As it happened, in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun.

Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs had pretty much the same epiphany. Blue collar jobs are satisfying, honest, real, and fun. The idea that doing real work is equal to misery is a myth. Yet, there is a tragedy in the bullshit work. It sucks the life out of you. It goes against our natures. Here is Crawford again:

Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. This is a stock figure of ridicule, but the sociologist Robert Jackall spent years inhabiting the world of corporate managers, conducting interviews, and he poignantly describes the “moral maze” they feel trapped in. Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.

This is a sad existence. Who enjoys being in this type of job? Only someone mentally defective could yearn to do this sort of thing day in and day out. Is being blue collar better than being white collar? YES! Crawford nails it on the head here:

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

Somewhere in a high rise office is an executive. He quaffs a Scotch and loosens his tie. He has risen far in the company, but he can't tell you exactly what it is that he does. He doesn't know from one day to the next if he will be promoted, forgotten, or terminated. All his coworkers are enemies looking to plunge a dagger in his back at the first opportunity. He maintains the facade, but he hates his job. The perks are nice, but he realizes they are merely sugar on shit. He gazes at a building under construction and sees iron workers putting together rebar. They don't even make a third of what he makes, but he envies them. Without men such as this, his office would not exist. There would be no chair to sit in or desk to write on. It is men such as these that make the world work. They make the world livable. They deal with iron and concrete. What they do matters. His PowerPoint from a month ago is now ancient corporate history. The company is paying a consulting outfit $250K to help craft a new mission statement. 250 smackers to write a goddamn sentence. Madness. Pure fucking madness. He pours himself another drink but would trade it for one Pabst Blue Ribbon with those real men at the end of their hard but satisfying day.

It is fashionable to put down working class people. Elitist snobs like to find someone lower down the rungs to shit on. I've never understood this behavior. But I am beginning to understand it. These white collar fuckheads don't despise blue collar people but what those blue collar people stand for. Being blue collar is about honesty and integrity. It is about living free of the bullshit. This drives white collar pricks insane. They are morally empty, and their derision hides their desperation. Those blue collar people have to be miserable because if they are happy then the white collar people have it wrong. They have wasted their lives.

I write all sorts of things to piss off religionists, leftards, and fasctards. But nothing draws more ire than this blue collar theme I harp on. It unsettles people because it cuts deeper than mere belief. We are talking about how people make their livings. No one wants to be told that their work is inauthentic. They want to believe that what they do matters. Yet, they struggle to say exactly what it is that they do. They don't know.

Do I feel a certain superiority to these people? Yes, I do. I have a real job. What I do matters. What I do makes the world a better place. I smile, and I enjoy my work. I enjoy the camaraderie of my coworkers, and I sleep well every night. There was a time when my dream job was to be a lawyer. Now, I wish I was one of those underwater welders. That is one neat job there. But I think there is more authenticity in the work of a short order cook than there is in a hundred MBAs.

I hope my computer programmer friend found his way back into a real job. I couldn't even post this essay without people like him, and you wouldn't be reading it. But I know the source of his misery now. He had stopped doing real work. Quitting that job was the right thing to do.

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The Case For Working With Your Hands by Matthew B. Crawford

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