If ‘Blue-collar’ doesn’t work for you, change it to white!

The 19th century idea of a blue-collar worker is being used as a 21st century vote bank. America and the Western Europe milked the world for 150 years when they moved their surplus agrarian workforce to the then emerging industrial sector. The mechanization of the production might have started in the 18th century in Europe but the organized industrialization of labor began in the United States of America in the middle of 19th century. The term blue-collar was coined in the 19th century uniform dress code of industrial workplaces. The blue-collar worker was a member of the working class who typically performed manual labor like mining and manufacturing and earned an hourly wage. These were skilled or unskilled workers who needed lesser formal academic education to succeed in their respective professions. Many blue collar workers are either members of a labor union or strongly support worker’s rights in non-union labor situations. These color-coded identities resulted into a certain socio-economic class having traditional religious values and a strong sense of patriotism. Even when they moved to the emerging service sector, they were confined to the manual labor. Therefore, the blue-collar working class is reluctant to move-up to the now obvious information age. Subsidies and protectionism is not the solution!