Management is the administration of organizations, whether they are a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administration respectively. It is the science of managing the resources of business, government agencies, and other organizations.
Human resources (HR) is the set of people who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector, industry, or economy. A narrower concept is human capital, the knowledge and skills which the individuals command. Similar terms include manpower, labor, personnel, associates or simply: people.
A tradesperson is a skilled worker that specializes in a particular trade. Tradespeople usually gain their skills through work experience, on-the-job training, an apprenticeship program or formal education.
Social class in the United States refers to the idea of grouping Americans by some measure of social status, typically economic. However, it could also refer to social status or location. The idea that American society can be divided into social classes is disputed, and there are many competing class systems.
A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor and/or skilled trades. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled labor. The type of work may involve manufacturing, warehousing, mining, excavation, electricity generation and power plant operations, electrical construction and maintenance, custodial work, farming, commercial fishing, logging, landscaping, pest control, food processing, oil field work, waste collection and disposal, recycling, construction, maintenance, shipping, driving, trucking, and many other types of physical work. Blue-collar work often involves something being physically built or maintained.
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 and/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.
Underemployment is the underuse of a worker because a job does not use the worker's skills, is part-time, or leaves the worker idle. Examples include holding a part-time job despite desiring full-time work, and overqualification, in which the employee has education, experience, or skills beyond the requirements of the job.
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 on the 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 formal educated skilled labor include engineers, scientists, doctors and teachers, while examples of informal 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, upholstery, 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.
Though the American middle class does not have a definitive definition, contemporary social scientists have put forward several ostensibly congruent theories on it. Depending on the class model used, the middle class constitutes anywhere from 25% to 75% of households.
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.
Labor market segmentation is the division of the labor market according to a principle such as occupation, geography and industry.
The union wage premium refers to the degree to which wages for union members exceed those for otherwise similar non-unionized workers. Union wage premiums are one of the most researched and analyzed issues in labor economics. The modern scholarly consensus is that unions tend to be associated with higher wages, greater levels of benefits like health care and paid time off, and improved workplace protections.
A key worker, critical worker or essential worker is a public-sector or private-sector employee who is considered to provide an essential service. The term has been used in the United Kingdom in the context of workers who may find it difficult to buy property in the area where they work. The term was also used by the UK government during announcements regarding school shutdowns invoked in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to indicate parents whose occupations entitled them to continue sending their children to schools which were otherwise shut down by government policy, as well as teachers and LSAs at those schools.
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.
In the United States, the concept of a working class remains vaguely defined, and classifying people or jobs into this class can be contentious. Economists and pollsters in the United States generally define "working class" adults as those lacking a college degree, rather than by occupation or income. Many members of the working class, as defined by academic models, are often identified in the vernacular as being middle-class, there is considerable ambiguity over the term's meaning. According to Frank Newport, "for some, working class is a more literal label; namely, an indication that one is working." Sociologists such as Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl see the working class as the most populous in the United States, while other sociologists such as William Thompson, Joseph Hickey and James Henslin deem the lower middle class slightly more populous. In the class models devised by these sociologists, the working class comprises between 30% and 35% of the population, roughly the same percentages as the lower middle class. According to the class model by Dennis Gilbert, the working class comprises those between the 25th and 55th percentile of society. In 2018, 31% of Americans self described themselves as working class. Retired American adults are less likely to describe themselves as "working class", regardless of the actual income or education level of the adult. Those in the working class are commonly employed in clerical, retail sales, and low-skill manual labor occupations. Low-level white-collar workers are included in this class.
The working class, sometimes referred to as the labour class, includes employees engaged in manual labour and industrial occupations who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts. Working-class occupations include blue-collar jobs, and most pink-collar jobs. Members of the working class rely exclusively upon earnings from wage labour; thus, according to more inclusive definitions, the category can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies, as well as those employed in the urban areas of non-industrialized economies or in the rural workforce.
A new-collar worker is an individual who develops technical and soft skills needed to work in the contemporary technology industry through nontraditional education paths. The term was introduced by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty in late 2016 and refers to "middle-skill" occupations in technology, such as cybersecurity analysts, application developers and cloud computing specialists.
The Standard Occupational Classification, often abbreviated as the SOC, is the system used by the United Kingdom's Office for National Statistics (ONS) to classify people for statistical purposes according to their job. Under this system, a job is defined as "a set of tasks or duties to be carried out by one person". The SOC classifies jobs according to the level and specialisation of skill. The SOC was introduced in 1990. It has undergone several revisions; the latest, SOC 2020, includes nine major groups of occupations, each broken down into smaller units: there are 26 sub-major groups, 104 minor groups and 412 unit groups. The groups are designed to be as similar as possible to the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008.
