Here's Every Color Collar Job and What It Means

We usually hear about collar colors on the news, as in "white-collar crime," right? And most of us have heard about blue-collar workers, usually in conjunction with someone like Bruce Springsteen as a blue-collar hero (even though he's never worked a 9-to-5 job).

You probably didn't know there's a variety of other color designations when describing specific labor forces, though, because their use is not nearly as widespread as blue and white.

Here's a list of all those colors and what they mean, including white-collar vs blue-collar jobs.

White-Collar Workers

White-collar workers have this color designation because office workers often wore white dress shirts with collars. This white-collar set includes managers, financial analysts, computer programmers, and the like.

Their training most often stems from a college degree, and many white-collar workers hold graduate degrees. White-collar jobs are usually salaried positions, which usually means a few things:

• They generally make more money than blue-collar employees.
• They often get asked to work in on-call situations that require them to work hours in addition to a normal work day.
• They don't usually receive overtime pay.

Blue-Collar Workers

Blue-collar workers make up a level of the workforce often seen as a lower class than their white-collar counterparts. It's much more likely that a blue-collar worker could receive on-the-job training that increases their value to the marketplace. In general, blue-collar jobs pay less than white-collar ones, but that's not always the case.

The color designation comes from the blue chambray workshirts many manual laborers wore in the 20th century.

Other Colors

A large part of the workforce consists of blue- and white-collar jobs, but not every employment opportunity falls into those two categories. Other employees—sometimes due to the positions they work, and sometimes due to where they live or their financial situations—get other color designations, as you'll see below.

Red-Collar Workers

These workers are those who work for state or federal government offices. It's a sweeping designation that covers senators, congressional aides, librarians, accountants, and other jobs. The only requirement is that the position is with the government. Even the president of the United States is a red-collar worker.

The color comes from the money used to pay them. It often came from a red-ink budget—basically, the government spending money it didn't have because it had to pay its workers.

Orange-Collar Workers

Most of us know that when you go to prison, they make you wear an orange jumpsuit. Fewer of us know that many prisoners work jobs while they serve their time (this is where the stereotype of prisoners making license plates comes from).

Orange-collar workers are the prisoners who work these jobs. They may work in the prison laundry, cafeteria, or law library, or they may do groundskeeping or farming work.

Scarlet-Collar Workers

This relatively new designation applies to so-called adult industry workers. While the term has a slant toward internet pornography workers, it's not solely reserved for this type. Sex workers are also scarlet-collar workers.

While red is the color of love or passion, scarlet carries some more lascivious connotations due to Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter.

Green-Collar Workers

This color description covers jobs that might otherwise be blue-collar or white-collar but get the green designation because they work jobs related to the environment.

Green jobs are those related to sustainability, renewable energy sources, and the development of related technologies. The corporate executive of a green company with an MBA from Harvard is just as much a green-collar worker as the manual laborer who builds wind turbines or solar panels.

Black-Collar Workers

This ambiguous term can apply to people working jobs so dirty that their collars conceivably end up black from dirt or grime. These employees perform dirty and dangerous jobs involving manual labor, such as coal mining. Pretty much any job you've seen Mike Rowe perform on TV is a black-collar job.

The designation can also apply to illegal occupations—criminal jobs like drug- or gun-running, and organized crime rackets like numbers game runners or professional killers.

Grey-Collar Workers

Another term with two meanings, grey-collar can refer to a class of jobs that blend elements of white- and blue-collar jobs. An engineer, for example, has a college degree and works in an office, but he might also spend part of his workweek out in the field, climbing bridges and towers to inspect them.

Grey-collar can also refer to older workers who have retired and now work a different job or who continue to work at a job of any color past the typical retirement age.

Gold-Collar Workers

These workers can be considered a tier above white-collar workers in the training required for their jobs. Doctors (especially surgeons or anesthesiologists), airline pilots, or particle physicists are gold-collar employees.

Gold-collar workers make a lot of money for the companies they work for, and they usually make large salaries, hence the gold reference. These are usually jobs that rely heavily on knowledge of science and math.

No-Collar Workers

Presumably, the work-at-home worker can wear a t-shirt or no shirt while doing his job. The no-collar worker is a freelancer—perhaps a writer, musician, or sculptor— who lives outside the usual structure of the workforce and most people's workday schedules.

The no-collar worker has found a way to make a living without relying on a large company for employment or the need for a boss and corporate structure.

Conclusion

The designation of the white-collar vs blue-collar job world doesn't cover every career out there, which is good because those two categories don't suit every member of the workforce. With training and specific skill sets, workers can ease into any category of other collar colors.

So, which one sticks out to you?