White-collars represent a broad category of employees: office, clerical, sales, semi technical and professional, and minor supervisory employees.
"
White-collar workers perform tasks which are less ‘laborious,' yet often more highly paid than blue-collar workers, who do manual work. Indeed, generally, the pay rate is higher among
white-collar workers although many of them are not necessarily upper class as the term once implied. They are salaried professionals (such as some doctors or lawyers), as well as employees in administrative or clerical positions. Formerly a minority in the agrarian and early industrial societies, they have become a majority in industrialized countries. The recent technological revolution has created disproportionately more desk jobs, and lessened the number of employees doing manual work in factories."
(Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia,
White-Collar Worker, 2009, visited 2011-07-14)
The term "
white-collar" was popularized in the early 1920s, to mean anyone who does not perform manual labour. It was first used in reference to the white shirts worn by office workers, as opposed to the blue shirts worn by factory workers.
"Up to the 1940s,
white-collar employees were a minor part of organized labor in most Western countries, with unions of blue-collar employees being the dominant force. Blue-collar unions tended to regard
white-collar unions poorly because their members did not perform ‘real' work. And for most of history, distinctions of social class underlay blue and white collar work. Blue-collar workers were, by general definition, the working class, whereas
white-collar employees came from the middle class and often saw themselves as socially superior. As members of the middle class,
white-collar employees were less likely to join unions, particularly if they enjoyed advantageous conditions from their employers."
(Docherty, J.C.,
Historical Dictionary of Organized Labor, Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004)
"In 1956, for the first time in U.S. history,
white-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar workers, and the gap has widened ever since."
(Murray, R. E.,
The Lexicon of Labor: More Than 500 Key Terms, Biographical Sketches, and Historical Insights Concerning Labor in America, New York: New Press, 1998)
The tendency now is to eliminate the broad categorization of jobs as white-collar or blue-collar. These titles are disappearing because of the favourable impression given by "
white-collar" and the more pejorative notion of "blue-collar jobs." Also, the terms are unevenly applied and commonly misunderstood as it is often assumed that the two together include all occupations, though neither category covers service and farm groupings.
(adapted from Anglim, C.T.,
Labour, Employment and the Law, A Dictionary, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997)