White Collar Workers

Examples of White Collar Workers in the following topics:

• Modern Management

  • The mechanization of the manufacturing process allowed workers to be more productive in less time and factories to operate more efficiently.
  • Frederick Winslow Taylor observed that the use of more advanced machinery could improve efficiency in steel production by requiring workers to make fewer motions in less time.
  • Machine shops, comprised of highly skilled workers and engineers, grew rapidly.
  • The number of unskilled and skilled workers increased as their wage rates grew.
  • Career tracks were offered to skilled blue-collar workers and white-collar managers, starting in railroads and expanding into finance, manufacturing, and trade.

• Introduction to Labor in America: The Worker's Role

  • Unskilled workers fared poorly in the early U.S. economy, receiving as little as half the pay of skilled craftsmen, artisans, and mechanics.
  • More and more workers hold white-collar office jobs rather than unskilled, blue-collar factory jobs.
  • Meanwhile, many younger, skilled workers have come to see unions as anachronisms that restrict their independence.
  • But unskilled workers in more traditional industries often have encountered difficulties.
  • The 1980s and 1990s saw a growing gap in the wages paid to skilled and unskilled workers.

• Trends in Labor-Management Relations

  • Over the last decades, unions' influence has waned, and workers' collective voice in the political process has weakened.
  • At the federal level, President John Kennedy, in 1962, issued Executive Order 10988, upgrading the status of unions of federal workers.
  • Adding in the 3.7 million federal civilian employees, in 2010, 8.4 million government workers were represented by unions, including:
  • White-collar jobs in the service sector, often filled by women workers, include:
  • As the industrial sector declined, attention has turned to organizing women in white-collar service jobs.

• Industrial Conflict

  • Industrial sociology examines the effects of industrial organization on workers, and the conflicts that can result.
  • Braverman demonstrated several mechanisms of control in both the factory blue collar and clerical white collar labor force.
  • Trade union organizations may be composed of individual workers, professionals, past workers, students, apprentices and/or the unemployed .
  • Industrial unionism is a labor union organizing method through which all workers in the same industry are organized into the same union—regardless of skill or trade—thus giving workers in one industry, or in all industries, more leverage in bargaining and in strike situations.
  • In addition to advocating for worker rights, unions may also engage in broader political or social struggle.

• Inequalities of Work

  • This explanation of the pay gap invokes the notion of the pink-collar worker.
  • A "pink-collar worker" is a term for designating the types of jobs in the service industry that are considered to be stereotypically female, such as working as a waitress, nurse, teacher, or secretary.
  • The term attempts to distinguish this type of work from blue-collar and white-collar work.
  • The above graph shows the average earnings of workers by education and sex.

• Job Discrimination

  • This explanation of the pay gap invokes the notion of the pink-collar worker.
  • A pink-collar worker is a term for designating the types of jobs in the service industry that are considered to be stereotypically female, such as working as a waitress, nurse, teacher or secretary.
  • The term attempts to distinguish this type of work from blue-collar and white-collar work.

• White-Collar Crime

  • White-collar crime is a financially motivated, nonviolent crime committed for illegal monetary gain.
  • White-collar crime is a financially motivated, nonviolent crime committed for illegal monetary gain.
  • White-collar crime, is similar to corporate crime, because white-collar employees are more likely to commit fraud, bribery, ponzi schemes, insider trading, embezzlement, cyber crime, copyright infringement, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery .
  • The term "white-collar crime" was coined in 1939 by Edwin Sutherland, who defined it as a "crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation" in a speech entitled "The White Collar Criminal" delivered to the American Sociological Society.
  • Instead, white-collar criminals are opportunists, who learn to take advantage of their circumstances to accumulate financial gain.

• Industrial Work

  • In common parlance, these people are often referred to as blue-collar workers.
  • Often, blue-collar workers physically build or maintain something .
  • The term "blue collar" refers to the type of clothing often worn by industrial workers.
  • Some blue-collar workers have uniforms embroidered with either the business' name or the individual's name.
  • This clip from CNN shows the development of a new type of blue-collar worker in South Carolina.

• The Working Class

  • Those in the working class are commonly employed in low-skilled occupations, including clerical and retail positions and blue collar or manual labor occupations.
  • Low-level, white-collar employees are sometimes included in this class, such as secretaries and call center employees.
  • Class War: Workers battle with the police during the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934.

• The Importance of Paid and Unpaid Work

  • Examples of unpaid workers include members of a family or cooperative; conscripts or forced labor; volunteer workers who work for charity or amusement; students who take intern positions as work experience; or conventional workers who are not paid because their enterprise is short of money.
  • Workers may be paid in a variety of ways, most commonly hourly wages or salaries.
  • Unpaid workers work without pay.
  • An internship is a system of on-the-job training for white-collar and professional careers.
  • Though unpaid, this domestic work is crucial to the economy: it keeps workers alive and healthy and helps raise new generations of workers to keep the paid economy running.