It is always a matter of taste to wear the colour you like. It may be red, yellow, grey, blue, black or white. No one will say anything to you as far as your colour preferences are concerned, but traditionally there are such colours as blue and white that define not the palette colours only, but in combination with the word ‘collar’ start bringing up the socioeconomic characteristics. I mean the traditional century-long devision of workers into blue collars and white collars.
First, it is necessary to stress that these notions denote completely different things; people do the jobs that are not similar at all. Moreover, here, I think, one may say that the work of a blue-collar worker is harder. It can be explained by such characteristic features as the type of their work, the money these workers are paid for their job, the preparation needed and the field of applying their knowledge.
First of all, the blue collars, who were traditionally considered to wear blue working robes – the fact that gave the nickname to this socioeconomic class – though now one can find this hard working people in grey and red as well, perform the manual work. Who can disagree that digging, constructing something, repairing the trucks is easier than non-manual work? No one, I guess.
Second, as the white-collar workers are occupied in the service sphere and in the majority of cases have a calm, permanent office work with documents, the blue-collar class representatives have to fight for their life while working in dangerous construction places, plants. Their work is unexpected, as well as health killing. Though it is the age of technologies and the machines do lots of work, still it is much cheaper to use the work of a blue-collar. This reminds a bit of the medieval times with their slavary, in this case it being the technological slavary.
Third, the blue-callar workers who perform the worst and the most complicated work (I mean physically) do not get regular salary. They are like part-time workers, like freelances: if they have work, they get money for it; if there is no job to do, they get nothing, and the majority of blue-collars have big families to feed waiting for their fathers or mothers back home, whereas the white-collars are given a regular salary. If none can provide them with work, the state or the company will still pay to them. Moreover, if they are retired or dismidded from office, they will get a good compensation and service pension. The same can never be applied to the blue collars, as they will never get the same high pension or compensation. The only state help they can “dream of” is the disability pension, quite an often prospect concerning their hard work.
One more point to add here is the education. As the white collars are the educated workers, they graduate from colleges and universities and have bright and peaceful perspectives in their life, the blue collars, their social rivals, may be either skilled or unskilled workers, the latter occuring far often. The blue-collar workers seldom graduate from colleges. Technical schools, liceum education is what they usually get, but in the absolute majority of cases they simply apply for the positions where they can get some money to survive, as the office job seems and in fact is too far away from their social class prospects, which causes the demonstrations, strikes and protests.
To sum it up, I would like to say that the blue-collars, as the ones who face the necessity to fight for their bread (in comparison to the day-to-day calm life of white-collars) have to work harder than other socioeconomic classes.