Former Blue-Collar Worker Says His Previous Colleagues Constantly Talk Down On White-Collar Workers, Not The Other Way Around
As class and education divides wreak havoc on our country, perhaps we all need to examine our judgments.
visualspace | VioletaStoimenova | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro For ages now, the divide between blue-collar "working class" professionals and degree-holding "white-collar" career types has seemed to grow ever more contentious — and ever more politically impactful, too.
At the heart of the divide is the conventional wisdom that many white-collar people, including our political leaders, look down on blue-collar workers as less sophisticated or important. But one former tradesman says we need to re-examine this long-held belief.
A former blue-collar worker says it's actually blue-collar workers who judge white-collar workers, not the other way around.
After last week's shocking election results, it really seems like Democrat Joe Biden's win in 2020 might have been an aberration brought on by the previous administration's incompetent handling of a terrifying pandemic.
The 2024 election seems to have hewed to many of the same contours as 2016 — namely, Donald Trump being swept to power in part by a wave of economic worries and the class resentments of the white working class.
But for one former blue-collar worker turned doctor on Reddit, this is all feeling a bit confusing. In his experience, it's not the "degreed professionals" that have been the target of populist sentiment for the past 10 years who are judging the working class, but rather the exact opposite.
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"Am I missing something or do most blue-collar workers just hate white-collar workers because of their [education]," the man wrote in his Reddit post. For him, the problem seems to not be judgment from elites but working-class people's own deeply held insecurities about themselves.
He expected to be judged for his blue-collar past when he went to medical school. Instead, the opposite happened.
"I was a stonemason before applying for medical school and it was almost a personality trait of everyone I met in my trade that white-collar workers 'hated them,' and they 'look down on them,'" he said.
He also said his stonemason co-workers constantly talked about how much more important their work was and would mock white-collar people for having school debt.
It is pitiful victimization," they turn on themselves, he said, "just because these guys made a choice to go to college" rather than a trade school.
"When I went to higher education to learn for the first time, I came with this conception that white collar folks would hate me," he went on to explain.
Instead, the exact opposite happened. "They thought it was cool what I did before and wanted to even see me in action." And it's left him taking the opposite view than the one conventional wisdom dictates.
He believes blue-collar workers have an 'inferiority complex' that makes them rail against white-collar people instead of the real enemy — the 1%.
"I genuinely think blue-collar workers have an insane inferiority complex," he went on to say. "They are scared of people who are smart, so they demean them."
But he said he's never really seen this go in the other direction. "I see [blue-collar people] acting like they are downplayed," he wrote, but "I don’t see anyone doing this."
And he thinks that we need to collectively stop accepting the contention that this supposed judgment heaped on working-class people is real for one all-important reason: "Neither type of… workers should be against each other, and it is the richest 1% who we should be against."
His take definitely sounds controversial, but most on Reddit agreed with him. "I'm from an area where coal mining has always dominated," one wrote. "If you don't become a coal miner, the only reason is because you can't handle it, you ain't man enough, or… you got brainwashed by the big city elites, etc. Blue-collar elitism is absolutely a thing."
Others described being white-collar or blue-collar themselves in a family of the opposite type, and how all it has resulted in is a mutual interest in their very different lives and being able to use each others' very different skills.
Still, there's no smoke without fire — decades of politicians insisting everyone just needs to go to college to succeed is pretty inherently dismissive of blue-collar work and the culture that is often attached to it. (It has also resulted in a crippling worker shortage in the trades.)
But equally inarguable is this man's central point: It is elites running the corporations and the politicians who best serve their interests who are actually making our lives harder.
And those same politicians have cleverly stoked and leveraged our anger at each other to convince all too many workers to vote directly against our own interests and empower people who, time and time again, prove that their only objective is to make corporations more powerful and the 1% richer.
Whatever the cause and whoever's judging who, we all need to stop falling for it, assuming it's not already too late.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.