A tradesperson or tradesman/woman is a skilled worker that specialises in a particular trade. Tradespeople (tradesmen/women) usually gain their skills through work experience, on-the-job training, an apprenticeship program or formal education.
A white-collar worker is a person who performs professional service, desk, managerial, or administrative work. White-collar work may be performed in an office or other administrative setting. White-collar workers include job paths related to government, consulting, academia, accountancy, business and executive management, customer support, design, economics, engineering, market research, finance, human resources, operations research, marketing, public relations, information technology, networking, law, healthcare, architecture, and research and development. In contrast: blue-collar workers perform manual labor or work in skilled trades; pink-collar workers work in care, health care, social work, or teaching; and grey-collar jobs combine manual labor and skilled trades with non-manual or managerial duties.
In macroeconomics, the labor force is the sum of those either working or looking for work :
A clerk is a white-collar worker who conducts record keeping as well as general office tasks, or a worker who performs similar sales-related tasks in a retail environment. The responsibilities of clerical workers commonly include record keeping, filing, staffing service counters, screening callers, and other administrative tasks. In City of London livery companies, the clerk is the chief executive officer.
A laborer is a skilled trade, a person who works in manual labor types, especially in the construction and factory industries. Laborers are in a working class of wage-earners in which their only possession of significant material value is their labor. Industries employing laborers include building things such as roads, road paving, buildings, bridges, tunnels, pipelines civil and industrial, and railway tracks. Laborers work with blasting tools, hand tools, power tools, air tools, and small heavy equipment, and act as assistants to other trades as well such as operators or cement masons. The 1st century BC engineer Vitruvius writes that a good crew of laborers is just as valuable as any other aspect of construction. Other than the addition of pneumatics, laborer practices have changed little. With the introduction of field technologies, the laborers have been quick to adapt to the use of this technology as being laborers' workforce.
A construction worker is a worker employed in the physical construction of the built environment and its infrastructure.
A skilled worker is any worker who has special skill, training, knowledge which they can then apply to their work. A skilled worker may have learned their skills through work experience, on-the-job training, an apprenticeship program or formal education. These skills often lead to better outcomes economically. The definition of a skilled worker has seen change throughout the 20th century, largely due to the industrial impact of the Great Depression and World War II. Further changes in globalisation have seen this definition shift further in Western countries, with many jobs moving from manufacturing based sectors to more advanced technical and service based roles. Examples of formally educated skilled labor include engineers, scientists, doctors and teachers, while examples of less formally educated workers include crane operators, CDL truck drivers, machinists, drafters, plumbers, craftsmen, cooks and bookkeepers.
A pink-collar worker is someone working in the care-oriented career field or in fields historically considered to be women's work. This may include jobs in the beauty industry, nursing, social work, teaching, secretarial work, or child care. While these jobs may also be filled by men, they have historically been female-dominated and may pay significantly less than white-collar or blue-collar jobs.
Day labor is work done where the worker is hired and paid one day at a time, with no promise that more work will be available in the future. It is a form of contingent work.
Grey-collar refers to the balance of employed people not classified as white- or blue collar. It is occasionally used to describe elderly individuals working beyond the age of retirement, as well as those occupations that incorporate some of the elements of both blue- and white-collar, and generally are in between the two categories in terms of income-earning capability.
Workwear is clothing worn for work, especially work that involves manual labour. Often those employed within trade industries elect to be outfitted in workwear because it is built to provide durability and safety.
In economics, deskilling is the process by which skilled labor within an industry or economy is eliminated by the introduction of technologies operated by semi- or unskilled workers. This results in cost savings due to lower investment in human capital, and reduces barriers to entry, weakening the bargaining power of the human capital. Deskilling is the decline in working positions through the machinery or technology introduced to separate workers from the production process.
Skill is a measure of the amount of worker's expertise, specialization, wages, and supervisory capacity. Skilled workers are generally more trained, higher paid, and have more responsibilities than unskilled workers.
A green-collar worker is a worker who is employed in an environmental sector of the economy. Environmental green-collar workers satisfy the demand for green development. Generally, they implement environmentally conscious design, policy, and technology to improve conservation and sustainability. Formal environmental regulations as well as informal social expectations are pushing many firms to seek professionals with expertise with environmental, energy efficiency, and clean renewable energy issues. They often seek to make their output more sustainable, and thus more favorable to public opinion, governmental regulation, and the Earth's ecology.
Blue collar workersin Japan encompass many different types of manual labor jobs, including factory work, construction, and agriculture. Blue-collar workers make up a very large portion of the labor force in Japan, with 30.1% of employed people ages 15 and over working as "craftsman, mining, manufacturing and construction workers and laborers" as of 1995 census data. The blue-collar class includes regular, non-regular, and part-time workers, as well as a large number of foreign laborers, all with varying work schedules and employment benefits.
Collar color is a set of terms denoting groups of working individuals based on the colors of their collars worn at work. These can commonly reflect one's occupation within a broad class, or sometimes gender; at least in the late 20th and 21st century, these are generally metaphorical and not a description of typical present apparel. For the two terms of longest use, white-collar workers are named for the white-collared shirts that were fashionable among office workers in the early and mid-20th century. Blue-collar workers are referred to as such because in the early 20th century, they usually wore sturdy, inexpensive clothing that did not show dirt easily, such as blue denim or cambric shirts.
The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most common definitions of "working class" in use in the United States limit its membership to workers who hold blue-collar and pink-collar jobs, whose income is insufficiently high to place them in the middle class, or both. However, socialists define "working class" to include all workers who fall into this category; thus, this definition can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies.
Work or labour is the intentional activity people perform to support the needs and wants of themselves, others, or a wider community. In the context of economics, work can be viewed as the human activity that contributes towards the goods and services within an economy.
Dagongmei are Chinese female migrant workers in the cities. This term emerged during the post-Mao Reform Period (1978-) and is still a relevant term in the present day. Its purpose was to denote a new kind of labor relation that distinguishes itself from the labor relations during the Mao Era.
