White Collar Blues
Are "Knowledge Workers" becoming blue collar? How language is reshaping the middle class.
"What do your parents do?"
As a person well into mid-life, the question still gives me involuntary pause.
Not because of embarrassment, or shame, or any other negative sentiments. But because I know a lot of middle-class, white-collar people don't usually have a follow-up question to my answer.
When we migrated to Australia in the 80s, my parents struggled to find work.
Mum? She ended up staying at home to look after us while doing some part time work because as recruiters so eloquently said – they’d prefer “people who were more Aussie” for her line of work (but that’s a story for another day about Australia in the 80s…)
And dad? He ended up as a cleaner. Well, most of the time. In between that he did a bit of everything – factory work, house painting, some carpentry, construction…
Neither graduated high school. Left after grade 9 to work, believe it or not.
Now would you like me to help you out and change the subject? Or shall we let the awkward silence hang in the air for a bit?
I bring this up because having grown up on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum (i.e. what rich people call “poor”, I believe…) And being "first generation white-collar" – I've had front row seats to how both sides think, talk, and view each other.
But my story isn't unique. And it's not intended to be milked for sympathy.
There are absolutely others who have experienced worse obstacles and challenges… I'm just reflecting on what's helped (hindered?) my own perspective. Because lately, it's made me question a phrase I'm hearing everywhere:
"Knowledge workers."
Keeping it professional
Now I know it's not a new phrase. The term "knowledge worker" was first coined by Peter Drucker – a management consultant and author – in his books "The Landmarks of Tomorrow" (1959) and "The Effective Executive" (1966).
Essentially, Drucker identified the "knowledge worker" as one who applies theoretical and analytical knowledge, gained through formal training, to develop products and services.
His work predicted the increasing importance of knowledge and intellectual labor in the future of work and business, and argued that the most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution would be its knowledge workers and their productivity.
But the term was never commonly used – particularly in Australia, where I've predominantly worked. In fact, the language was more "elevated" – professional, subject matter expert… and titles carried an air of importance (director, consultant, specialist, etc.)
In short, corporate culture sought out ways to elevate the perception of knowledge work. And it was a mutually beneficial arrangement:
For the individual – it inflated the ego.
For organisations – it inflated the charge-out rate / profitability.
For clients/customer/end user – it inflated confidence.
The cost/benefit ratio seemed to work for everyone, and we all plodded along as happy little capitalists.
But read any AI-related article, post, or opinion piece online these days and you'll notice the ratio's slightly out of whack.
The term is becoming weaponised to mush all the different types of “knowledge work” under the same banner – from diagnosing illnesses to resolving customer complaints.
Doctors, lawyers, and engineers…
Filmmakers, designers, and copywriters…
Accountants, sales reps, and HR…
Roles, industries, and specialisms – all the swim lanes are being removed and corralled into a single pool called "knowledge work."
And while it's technically true that all these types of work share the similarity of "brain-generated value" – oversimplifying it as such lays the groundwork for the commercial gains many corporations want to realise through AI adoption.
To be blunt, a by-product of this is that the term is being used in part to reclassify the middle class into the working class.
What's in a name?
Like most disruptive technologies or ideologies – for AI to take hold, it has to win the commercial argument… and also the cultural one.
The commercial argument is designed to obviously appeal to the corporate world (CEOs, shareholders, and corporations). But to prevent mass rioting, they also need to placate the masses – i.e., make it culturally acceptable/palatable.
Deploying the broad use of "knowledge worker" does the cultural job by stealth.
The commercial argument undercuts, while the cultural argument undermines.
Now, we could talk about how industrialisation is the common catalyst for cultural shifts – delving into how key innovations throughout the centuries pushed human-driven expertise to the fringes in favor of mass production, and devalued once skill-based professions into replicable/scalable ones.
But that would involve paragraph-long sentences like the one above, which I have no business or expertise to credibly discuss. I mean I could try, but I'd greatly need to lean on AI… and the irony is definitely not lost on me in that respect.
So instead, let's use a more direct example of how language and labels are weaponised.
Learning to be content
In our not-so-recent past, there were articles, videos, films, shows, etc. all owning their own space in a landscape of art and communication.
But thanks to the internet, social media and streaming… it’s all been smooshed into a ubiquitous, grey term: “content”.
This is cheapening through words. Because everything has now become "content" – the quality, skill, value, and artistic merit of all these unique endeavours has been undermined. A feature film is no more or less than an engaging Instagram Reel. A carefully-researched article in the New York Times is shoulder-to-shoulder with a click-bait blog post. Same-same... and increasingly all in a jumbled mixing bowl.
To some degree, that is what "knowledge worker" is doing at a cultural level. It undermines the skill, training, expertise, and nuance required in doing all these "types" of jobs well – and makes it easier to posit that they can all be done "just as well" by anyone with the right "tool" (AI).
The obvious thing you may notice is that it's trying to devalue the contribution of the individual – essentially saying "anyone with a calculator is a mathematician" or "anyone with an Instagram filter is now a photographer"... or anyone with an AI tool that can read an X-Ray can be a doctor.
But zoom out and we can see the broader impact. It's not just about the survival of individual roles; it's about the value of the entire nature of "brain work" that's being repositioned as a labor force.
Sure, there may be those who argue that "only the cream of the crop/those who are exceptional will survive"… but it will more likely be similar to what happened to cobblers. Sure, there may be a small percentage of cases where you may take your expensive hand-crafted leather shoes to get resoled. But for 99% of the other cases, you'll just go buy new shoes.
The "craft" may remain. But very likely, not at the scale or volume it may have in the past.
Elusive escape velocity
These days, when someone asks me "What do your parents do?" – I find myself thinking about more than just the awkward silence that usually follows.
I think about how my dad's job as a cleaner was always seen as "manual labor": replaceable, scalable, disposable.
It was a large reason he (and many working class immigrants) push their kids to finish high school, get a university degree and “escape to the white collar world”.
But what AI presents is a moving of the goal posts.
What seemed like an acceptable plan to achieve escape velocity from the generational trap of being working class, is now wrapped in a creeping sense of existential dread.
The "knowledge work" I eventually moved into now feels like it’s being repackaged and devalued in real time. And the irony isn't lost on me: the son who escaped the working class to join the professional class is now watching that professional class get linguistically demoted back to where he started.
Having grown up watching both sides of the economic divide, I've learned that language is never neutral. The working class has always known this. They've watched "unskilled labor" become a way to justify low wages for physically demanding, often dangerous work.
Now it's the middle class's turn to discover how quickly professional language can be weaponised against them. "Knowledge worker" is just the latest example of how power reshapes reality through words. It happened with "human resources" instead of people, "right-sizing" instead of layoffs, "content" instead of art.
Each time, the new language makes the old reality seem quaint, outdated and ready for disruption.
Go down swinging
The real lesson here isn't about AI or automation – it's about paying attention to who controls the vocabulary, and what they're trying to sell us on. Because by the time we notice the words have changed, the world has usually already moved on without us.
So the next time you hear someone casually throw around "knowledge worker" – whether it's in a corporate strategy meeting, a news article, or a LinkedIn post about AI – pause for a moment.
Ask yourself: what's being flattened here? What nuance is being steamrolled? Because once we accept that a surgeon and a customer service rep are essentially doing the same type of "knowledge work," we've already conceded the argument.
Language shapes reality – and right now, while we're all distracted by the shiny promise of AI productivity gains, the terms of our professional lives are being quietly rewritten.
The question is: are we going to notice before it's too late, or just wake up one day wondering why our "knowledge work" is suddenly worth so much less?
So what's a "knowledge worker" supposed to do with all this?
Fight it? Adapt? Find new ways to prove their irreplaceability?
The honest answer is that I don't know – and anyone who claims they do is probably selling something (likely an AI tool). But I do know this: the first step is recognising what's happening. Understand that when your expertise gets lumped in with everyone else's under a generic label, you're not being promoted into some grand category of importance – you're being prepped for commoditisation.
Maybe the answer isn't to fight the label, but to insist on the specificity. To refuse the flattening. To keep drawing the distinctions and preserving the nuance that "knowledge work" is designed to erase.
It won't stop the tide, but at least we'll go down swinging: knowing exactly what we were, instead of what they told us we were.
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