Are Blue Collar Workers Wrong

Blue-collar jobs are considered jobs where workers work with their hands and do manual labor. Many citizens consider blue-collar jobs to house lower skilled workers ,or workers who have a lower education and assume they are less intelligent. The workers may not attend college or even finish high school. Keeping that in mind, blue-collar workers are not necessarily lazy. Blue-collar workers are more than they are given credit for. Workers in blue-collar jobs can be highly intelligent, hardworking, and extremely skilled in their field of work. Many workers will also go to college for degrees in fields like engineering. Blue-collar jobs certainly hold room for workers with degrees who are skilled in the field. Louis Uchitelle, the author of …show more content…
Mike Rose makes the point that “Intelligence is closely associated with formal education, and most people seem to move comfortable from that notion to a belief that work requiring less schooling requires less intelligence” in the article “Blue-Collar Brilliance” (Rose 281). The formal definition of Intelligence is “ the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment”(Webster). Rose uses an example of his mother working as a waitress “Waiting on seven to nine tables, each with two to six customers, Rosie devised memory strategies so that she could remember who ordered what. And because she knew the average time it took to prepare different dishes, she could monitor an order that was taking too long at the service station”(Rose 281). I consider Rosie to be an intelligent blue-collar worker. She applies her knowledge of how long it takes to cook food, and uses her memory strategies to do her job in an effective way. The job requires you to use your mind the whole time. Rosie had to read social cues so she would know who was in a bad mood and ultimately make money. She was able use the social cues to interact with customers to help her get a better tip. I would say she uses her knowledge to do her job in an efficient and effective manner. In “The Consequences- Undoing Sanity”, the candidate that beat Erin for a job at the Rolls Royce factory, also confirms that blue-collared …show more content…
Despite the fact that not all the workers go to college or graduate high school, they are still very hardworking. Anthony Depalma explains how illegal immigrants work in the restaurant business in the article “Fifteen Years on the Bottom Rung”. The restaurant business is vicious and has a large amount of workers to replace workers who have gotten fired and quit. With that in mind the immigrants have to work hard to keep their jobs. If they slack off they can easily be replaced and they have everything to lose. Many Mexican immigrants come over to make money to support their families. One worker is Juan Peralta whose father paid for a trip over to the United States, more specifically New York, to live with his Uncle (Depalma 356). Peralta’s eyes were opened “to how easy it could be to make money in New York...In six months, Peralta had paid back the money his father gave him”(Depalma 358). Peralta is a great example of a hard worker. He saw an opportunity to make money and took it. Many people would not be so ecstatic to pay back money let alone work a job as a dishwasher or cook in a low paying restaurant. He bounces around to make money rather than waiting for the money to come to him(Depalma 358). Peralta is considered a “lower-skilled” worker because he is working a dead end job, but there is no arguing that he is a hard worker. There are many other immigrants blue-collar workers who work just as hard a Juan Peralta