Former Blue-Collar Worker Who Became A Doctor Says One Industry Talks Down On The Other Way More
Spotmatik Ltd | Shutterstock 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. A doctor who once worked as a mason said his former colleagues were surprisingly to blame for the "us versus them" mentality.
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 said we need to re-examine this long-held belief because seeing both sides of the issue gave him a perspective that made him look at the class wars a little differently.
A former stonemason-turned-doctor said blue-collar workers judge white-collar workers more often.
The 2024 election brought to light how significant and underrepresented the economic worries and the class resentments of the white working class had become. But for one former blue-collar worker-turned-doctor on Reddit, that reasoning just didn't make sense.
In his experience, it wasn't 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 wasn't judgment from elites but working-class people's own deeply held insecurities about themselves.
The doctor 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 from the one conventional wisdom dictates.
He believes blue-collar workers have an 'inferiority complex' that makes them rail against white-collar people.
"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 other's very different skills.
Still, there's no smoke without fire. Decades of politicians insisting that everyone just needs to go to college to succeed are inherently dismissive of blue-collar work and the culture often associated with it. (It has also resulted in a crippling worker shortage in the trades.) As white-collar jobs dwindle and the trades seem to flourish, that mindset is quickly changing, making it even more important that both classes recognize how tenuous their class distinctions truly are and that they are not each other's rivals.
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. White-collar and blue-collar are in the same boat. The line between the two has pretty much faded, and it's time to work together for a future economy that benefits us all.
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.
