Blue Collar Brilliance Summary

When you think of work, what do comes to mind? Perhaps a retail job in the mall, or even an accountant crunching numbers. Now, think deeper. What is the true definition of work? Is it the physical characteristics and capabilities that define work or is it the mental aspect? Typically, society tends to classify work as “blue-collar” (physical wok) or “white-collar” (mental work). In the article Blue Collar Brilliance, Rose describes his uncle and mother’s “blue-collar” jobs as both white and blue collar. I didn’t necessarily believe him. I was stuck in the narrow mindedness of “white vs. blue”. But something changed. When Mike Rose (author) states that “Our culture—in Cartesian fashion—separates the body from the mind, so that, for example,

Mike Rose sets the tone for his argument in this sentence alone. In his article Blue Collar Brilliance, he describes how his mother and other family members would be stereotyped as working “blue-collar” jobs but excellently proves that they in fact do more than what meets the eye. I can attest to doing some of these ignorant assumptions with a lot of various occupations. However, the more I look back at my personal work experiences, some of my most challenging jobs could be classified as only doing only one to two mundane tasks, but in reality are much more complex than that. Case in point, my job as a store associate at The Cookie Store. Since I was only a store associate, people often think I only baked the desserts, ran the cash register and left. In truth, I had numerous managerial responsibilities. I was responsible for cleaning the store up to FDA standards, counting the cash register every night, calculating the daily bank deposits, as well as dealing with the psychological needs such as Mike Rose’s mother did. In retrospect, white-collar jobs can involve physical work too. When I was a dressing room attendant at Spirit Halloween, I was mainly responsible for putting costumes and other merchandise back on the shelves and

In my job at Spirit Halloween it showcases that public service work can combine physical work such as caring for their every desire and demand, and mental work by dealing with complaints. Another example of this crosshair of physical and mental is dealing with ethical issues. In Blue-Collar Brilliance, it was ethical issues in cases such as his mother taking care of orders in a timely manner when she thought it was taking too long. At my job at Lane Bryant, it was dealing with shop-lifting coworkers. As a seasonal sales associate at Lane Bryant, I did not get a lot of respect because I was new. I was only 18 and my other coworkers were all in there mid to late 30s. We had extensive training on how to deal with shoplifting coworkers and customers. Into my third week working there, I caught my coworkers stealing a hefty amount of inventory. I was put into a tight ethical dilemma. I was forced to choose whether to tell my manager and possibly be exiled by the rest of my coworkers, or keep the secret and possibly be fired. Now on the surface, this may not seem so “blue-collared” but indeed it was. Because I knew this secret, I was caused to stealthily avoid drama with these coworkers by physically placing myself on opposite ends of the store, requesting separate days to work to avoid conflict, and most of all avoid social outings with them since they threatened to physically attack me. This