By "blue collar work" do you mean that done by mechanics, carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, machinists, tool operators and repairmen? because yes I do.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Surgeon? Yes. House painter? Probably not.
In what world is a surgeon blue-collar? Certainly not this one.
It's not clean - debriding an abscessed bowel is about the grossest dirtiest job I can think of. It can be very physical, particularly when working with bone.
Those are the two criteria, the idea being that a white shirt (collar) would be ruined. Obviously, it's not just a synonym for unskilled work, or OP's question wouldn't even make sense.
White collar and blue collar is orthogonal to skill. Their are jobs in both categories that a monkey could do, and other jobs that take years and years of skill development to do well.
I go by...
- Skilled labour: Jobs that require education or extensive training to be able to perform
- Semi-skilled labour: Jobs that require minimal or no education, but require some extent of on-the-job training to be able to perform the basic duties.
- Unskilled labour: Jobs that require no education, and can be effectively performed on day one by a new hire.
I'm sure there's also a "highly skilled labour" category that encompasses jobs that require extensive education, training, and practice, but I'm not really sure where to draw the line.
On day one is a bit steep. Most unskilled kinds of jobs, like retail, include a week or two of training where you're only sort-of useful to your employer. Really really simple jobs (breaking rocks, digging trenches, turning wheels) have mostly been subsumed by machines.
From an employment market perspective, a better question is if you need to have training already to get hired, and if it's on-the-job kind of training (aka. semiskilled) or you spend significant time as a student.
I think in some unskilled labour, you can provide value on day one. You won't know all the processes, but you'd be able to perform some of the duties. Cleaning up, stocking shelves, etc.
The only unskilled labor is done by people that just sit around all day telling other people what to do.
Project and general management is, as I am acutely learning more frequently as time goes on, not easy for some people.
Neither is being able to put up with the public's BS for 8 hours a day, including weekends and most holidays, yet we still call that "unskilled labor".
Blue collar (blue coveralls class) is just a derogatory term to describe someone that doesn't wear a white collar (business suit class) to work. But it sorta turned into a badge of honor by the blue collar class over the years, but it's meant to be an insult by the white color class.
It has nothing to do with skilled or non-skilled labor or education, it's supposed to be an insult based on the clothes required to wear to work.
it was a way for the ownership to group the chattel. Some were restrained by blue collars and some by white. It also helped encourage rivalary between them to work out their aggression and reduce what comes to their masters.
It already is considered skilled labor.
It usually is. True unskilled labor is becoming less and less common as machines take over those tasks. Unskilled labor means that you could get any random person off the street and, if they had the physical ability to do the work (such as lifting heavy objects) they could do it with minimal training. Think of the type of thing you do at volunteering events where you get at most like a 30 minute explanation of what the job is and are set off with your task, or just moving a heavy object you can't move yourself. It's not that you can't be skilled at these jobs, but rather that there is little to no barrier to entry for starting and actually doing the job. This type of job was way more common most places in the past, where you had people whose job it was to mill grain by pushing a giant wheel, or people whose job it was to break rocks apart by hitting them with a hammer. Sure you can be better or worse at this, but it's not like you couldn't figure it out very quickly.
These days, true unskilled labor is pretty rare in advanced economies. You have to have a lot of knowledge of how to use some kind of machinery or equipment, or how to do some kind of craft. The closest is something like low level retail work but even then that requires more skill than traditional "unskilled labor" required- skills such as reading, writing, and counting money, and even fast food jobs usually require training periods.
You can develop a high level of skill at anything, is more a question of how important that is. In particular, you might say how important that is to people doing the hiring. It is clear for many jobs, they don't care. Some minimum wage jobs they will virtually take anyone with a pulse.
With white collar jobs it is a little more complicated. Project management is software is a position where i've often seen people with absolutely no skill helpful to the job. They may have needed a certain amount of political skill, or ass-kissing skill, or knowing how to say the right things, sling buzz words kind of skill. Skills that don't actually help be effective at the job itself.
There is no such thing as unskilled labor.
Any job will require a mix of hard and soft skills. Both are important, and both need training.
This is a very optimistic but ultimately baseless “feel-good” take.
I don’t think we should discount the importance of unskilled labor, or even its difficulty, but unskilled labor most certainly does exist.
Eh. There are definitely jobs that you can grab random guys off the street for and they will be okay enough at them to get started right away or will be able to be trained to do them in an afternoon. Think of any time you've done a volunteering project - you don't get any specialized training to do this type of work, but you can go ahead and get started with maybe like a short explanation of how it works. Sure you won't be as good as a pro, but you could get up to speed quite quickly if it was all you were doing. These types of jobs are becoming less and less common as they get automated, but they do still exist. That is what is meant by "unskilled labor." It's not a dig at the people who do these types of jobs, but rather that you don't need specialized training to do them.
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The focus on skill in the first place was so that they can make it a competition that they can exploit to call people "unskilled" without backlash from the "skilled" workers. If you put effort into your job, you should get paid fairly for it. I can think of a few CEOs that would take a pretty big pay cut if that were the case, though, so we're certainly not going to get it by asking.
I am a tradesman
I also have a bachelor of science degree
What I do is most definitely skilled labour
The bullshit, classist crap about what is and is not skilled labour is pathetic
I can promise that when the chips are down, the most useless people are the ones who sneer at those of us with calloused hands
I respect the fuck out of anyone who does jobs I can't or don't want to. The guy who empties septic tanks has my genuine respect and appreciation because if not for him I would have a really shitty job on my hands. Hopefully the humor doesn't undercut the sincerity of my comment.
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White collared folks are the unskilled ones. Blue collar workers are the ones who build the world and make it work. The tone of your question makes me dislike you.
The tone of this makes me think you spend a lot of time looking for ways to be mad.
Spoken like a true desk weight.
All work is skilled work.
accountants, IT, engineers. there are some skilled positions.
That's probably exclusively American term. I couldn't ever imagine calling a tradesman an "unskilled" labourer. You'll get a quick nosejob that way.
You wouldn't say this of a tradesman. Such people pass tests about meeting code, etc.
Unskilled labor is essentially labor that anyone with 4 limbs can do.
I'd call that unskilled, as someone who's done that kind of work. I've been the labor for a plumber, digging up septic pipes. Doesn't take any skill for that, just a willingness to sweat and get nasty. The plumber however definitely had skills, and I learned a LOT from him.
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That implies there is unskilled labour. What jobs require no skills to perform? Except manglement.
Shopping cart return, grocery bagging, dishwashing etc.
Bro there were people back in the day who would just push a heavy millstone around in a circle, a job that was often also done by literal donkeys. It's hard to imagine in a modern economy, where truly unskilled labor is rare, but it exists. We often forget how much is done by machines that was done by laborers in the past or still is in poorer countries.
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