From Steam Whistles to Coffee Breaks

Most students of the American worker begin their portraits with the same basic conceptual division: blue-collar manual workers on one side of the divide, white-collar nonmanual workers on the other. Jobs, people, and classes may change, but the distinction between office and factory seems eternally superimposed on our views of work.

It is a distinction that is losing its usefulness. “To say ‘white collar’ or ‘working class,'” as Harold Wilensky has written...