The Case For Working With Your Hands And Blue-Collar Brilliance

Throughout the United States, some types of work are valued highly over others. This stigma strongly associates the idea all career paths without the need of formal education require no cognitive skill and are unable to teach the same principles as a traditional classroom. This also causes the view that blue-careers specializing in a trade are overall lesser than white collar or office work that mandate a college degree. Authors Matthew B. Crawford and Mike Rose both argue this widespread belief is unfair and incorrect in their essays “The Case for Working with Your Hands” and “Blue-Collar Brilliance,” respectively. However, Crawford’s recollection of his own personal experience does not explain the valuable skills and knowledge learned from

Growing up witnessing his mother work as a waitress, Rose grew to appreciate the skills of physical work from a young age and in his essay takes this appreciation a step further by analyzing the knowledge required of blue-collar workers. First he references his mother’s ability to balance trays on her arm while holding coffee, having knowledge of how to position her body or to remember where each plate should be sat. He also references her ability to multitask, or “make every move count”, and how her mind was constantly at work thinking how to add task together to make sure the needs all her customers were met (281). He also cites the similar traits shared by his Uncle Joe. Joe worked as the foreman at General Motors, a quick paced environment as mentally taxing as family restaurant. Rose tells how his uncle “constantly faced new problems and became a consummate multitasker, evaluating a flurry of demands quickly, parceling out physical and mental resources” (282). His uncle learned to solve any problem, and even found areas in the shop where improvements could be made. Because of his experience, Joe was not only able to innovate the nozzle for spray painting cares but also began using shift rotation on the floor to ease the stress of factory workers (282-283). By adding his uncle’s experience, Rose is able to provide a more detailed explanation

He references two individual jobs he had, one at a policy organization as executive director, the other as an office worker writing abstractions for academic journals. Working at the policy organization, Crawford shares his issues with corporate mindset, claiming their mentality required him to think backwards, and thinking of how he wanted something to play out in order to plan the steps to take. He also claims that the work was dishonest, and how his boss urged him to make arguments he did not himself agree with (371). His work writing abstractions was similar, however his main concern was that the work lacked any true purpose or passion. Crawford was given a quota of how many journal summaries he needed to complete in a day, one that was barely met within the given time parameters. He explains that in order to survive at such a pace he needed to suppress his will for understanding and accuracy (375). There was no quality control to these essays, and Crawford even explains that the abstractions only added the companies “value” to their service and no real purpose to the content (375-376). Crawford’s issue with white collar work is well understood, however in his essay he only considers the point of view of himself majority of the time, adding a brief reference to his coworkers. These two men also wrote abstractions for the company, and shared similar