National Blue Collar Day Date in the current year: December 8, 2024

The term “blue-collar workers” refers to working class people who perform physical work. Blue-collar work may involve various types of manual labor, including commercial fishing, construction, custodial work, driving and trucking, excavation, farming, food processing, landscaping, logging, maintenance, manufacturing, mining, oil field work, pest control, recycling, shipping, warehousing, waste collection and disposal, and more.

Since most blue-collar jobs involve primarily manual labor, blue-collar workers typically do not need a college education. There are blue-collar jobs that don’t even require a high school diploma, and most skills are learned through on-the-job training. However, higher level blue-collar jobs, such as a plumber of electrician, usually require apprenticeship or vocational training, as well as some sort of certification.

Trade jobs have been called blue-collar jobs since the 1920s. The term emerged because manual laborers wore blue chambray or denim shirts as part of their uniforms, in contrast to white dress shirts worn by people working office jobs (white-collar workers). Over time, the term has gained certain socio-economic connotations, and people have started to use the adjective “blue-collar” to describe different settings and phenomena, such as “blue-collar neighborhood”, “blue-collar bar”, and even “blue-collar crime”.

In the modern word, however, the gap between blue-collar and white-collar jobs is not as wide as it used to be. Many entry level white-collar jobs are relatively low-paying, whereas skilled laborers can earn decent money. However, most blue-collar workers still find themselves at the low end of the payscale, despite their work being essential to our economy and society. They are overworked and underpaid, and something needs to be done about it. National Blue Collar Day was established to raise awareness of this injustice and celebrate all the hard-working people who help make everything around us run smoothly.

National Blue Collar Day was created by Todd Sohn in 2019. Its main goal is to highlight the contribution of all Americans who perform different kinds of manual labor and are often looked down upon because of this despite their jobs being essential to society. National Blue Collar Day is designed to remind us that everyone deserves to be treated with respect regardless of their occupation and socio-economic class.

If you want to celebrate National Blue Collar Day, do it by giving a shout out to all blue-collar workers on social media with the hashtag #NationalBlueCollarDay. A good way to show gratitude to the blue-collar workers in your life is to send them greeting cards, small gifts, or other tokens of appreciation. If you work a blue-collar job yourself, December 8 is your day! Celebrate it with your family and friends, or get together with your co-workers.