White-collar

The division of workers into "white-collar" and "blue-collar" categories emerged in the early twentieth century from the literal clothing worn to work. Office workers wore white dress shirts with detachable collars, while factory workers and manual laborers wore blue denim or chambray that hid dirt and grease.1 The phrase "white collar" appeared in print as early as 1910, used in a report describing the growing class of clerical and administrative workers in American cities.

Upton Sinclair used "white-collar" prominently in his 1919 novel The Brass Check, applying the color distinction to describe the social division between manual and non-manual labor.2 The categories entered sociological vocabulary through C. Wright Mills's White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), which analyzed the expanding population of salaried office workers, salespeople, and managers who formed a new class between factory labor and business ownership.3

Mills argued that white-collar workers occupied a peculiar position. They performed labor for wages, like factory workers, yet they identified with the managerial class above them. They wore the clothes of the professional but often had less autonomy than a skilled tradesperson. The distinction created a hierarchy based not on skill but on the physical conditions of work and the appearance of the worker.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics continues to categorize occupations along lines that echo the original collar distinction, separating "management, professional, and related occupations" from "production, transportation, and material moving occupations."4 Additional collar colors have proliferated, including "pink-collar" for service and care work, "gold-collar" for highly skilled knowledge workers, and "no-collar" for the creative class, though none have achieved the durability of the original pair.5