Who are these office workers?
July 7, 2021 7:35 AM   Subscribe

How many workers/percent in USA are in this boat: work in front of a computer/can work remote, generally but not always work a 9-5 M-F (at least need to work those hours), have benefits like 401ks, 2+ week paid vacation and most federal holidays paid, mostly employer subsidized health insurance, some amount of parental leave? (or combination or individual element of this above)

Media and advertising assumes that everyone is in this group. Basically everyone I know and interact with, and their parents and their friends are in this bucket (the others have the benefits but are health care workers). I would like to learn more about this group and comparative information to other western societies, how the size of the group changes policies and culture.

What are their demographics, their politics? What are these people called if I wanted learn more? Are there good articles/books about how this group differs from those in other countries and how this class of people was created?
posted by sandmanwv to Work & Money (23 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm noticing a very big detail that you've left out of your description - what it is that these employees do. And that may dramatically affect your answers.

I fit that category, as a secretary. But so does everyone I've ever worked with in every office I've ever worked in, as IT consultants or grant writers or archivists or corporate legal staff or Executive Vice Presidents or Chief Operating Officers or....

That's a huge range of economic classes there, and an equally huge range of political opinions based on the work it is that you do. Even if you just look at my bosses - the EVP of an NGO who dealt with resettling refugees would have vastly different opinions from the Managing Director of a bank's Equities team, and both of them would have different opinions from the dude who was the manager of a construction startup, and all three of them would differ from the guy who was the COO of a manufacturing/tech company....

So just double-checking, are you really looking for everyone in this category nevertheless? The only description I can think of would be "office worker". "White Collar" might refer to those who are more in the managerial level, with "pink collar" maybe reserved for secretarial staff (although some would categorize nurses and teachers in the 'pink collar" category as well). But there is a very broad range of categories within that one description you've offered, so I wanted to make sure you did mean to include them all.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:47 AM on July 7, 2021 [11 favorites]


I'm not sure about remote work but if you go to this table here: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm you can sort by number of persons employed in those categories (there's tons of information on the site) and start to get some idea. Whether you can do it by retirement benefits etc. I'm not sure, but you can by median wage.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:48 AM on July 7, 2021


The term I hear a lot is "knowledge worker."
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 8:14 AM on July 7, 2021 [5 favorites]


I think of this group as white-collar office workers, personally.
posted by jabes at 8:43 AM on July 7, 2021 [5 favorites]


“White Collar” by C. Wright Mills is one of the classic early studies. Richard Florida’s “creative class” stuff from the early 2000s has some factual information mixed in with the BS.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:46 AM on July 7, 2021 [1 favorite]


Working in software development matches your description. We may be in a cubicle farm, or a big open-office (possibly called the computer lab) or maybe we even have our own offices (in my experience, not since the 1980s). Depending on the site, we're probably not as well-dressed as most office workers (and this past year we've all been WFH). Unlike Sales and Advertising (which is what I imagine most white collar office jobs involve) we're writing code, making it work and testing it (to ensure it does what management is promising the clients), writing descriptive documentation and then packaging it all up somehow, for delivery.

What percentage of white-collar jobs are in IT? Beats me.
posted by Rash at 8:57 AM on July 7, 2021


Response by poster: I am looking for this whole group of people. Perhaps white collar is best description?
posted by sandmanwv at 9:04 AM on July 7, 2021 [2 favorites]


Honestly, I think just "office worker" is the best description. "White collar" wouldn't describe my own role, but I do fit this category of worker you describe.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:14 AM on July 7, 2021 [9 favorites]


One statistic you could look at is how many people are on the low income public health insurance in those states that offer it.
posted by aniola at 9:55 AM on July 7, 2021


Came here to suggest the Bureau of Labor Statistics, linked above. This is generally a good place to start with this kind of question.

As EmpressCallipygos hints, there are plenty of people making "working class" wages while holding this kind of job, including a big swathe of those classified as "paraprofessionals."
posted by aspersioncast at 9:58 AM on July 7, 2021


It's a very broad category, but I think I'd call them "desk jobs."
posted by cakelite at 10:47 AM on July 7, 2021 [3 favorites]


"Office worker."
posted by bluedaisy at 10:56 AM on July 7, 2021


"White collar" used to be useful, maybe like 50 years ago, but it's like "heavy metal" in the sense that everyone wants to further subcategorize themselves. "We're kind of prog-thrash with a bit of screamo influence." "We're proud to be a mix of pink collar and green collar", which I guess would be an eco-feminist company, which is almost always BS.

The other problem with "white collar" is whether it encompasses people like home inspectors, who are often licensed professionals and business owners, but who don't actually sit at a desk in an office all that much. Or dentists, for that matter.

The question that would actually give you what you're trying to get at is "how strongly did you identify with Peter in 'Office Space'?", but I don't think there are statistics about that, which is probably good for reasons of irony.
posted by kevinbelt at 11:00 AM on July 7, 2021


Do you mean can work remotely (as in their actual employer allows them to), or could work remotely (as in the job duties could theoretically be configured into a remote role)? I think that would make a signifcant difference in numbers.
posted by dusty potato at 11:24 AM on July 7, 2021 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: “Can work remotely”
posted by sandmanwv at 11:45 AM on July 7, 2021


I don't understand your remote-work clarification in the context of your question, which otherwise describes a recognizable part of the workforce known as "desk jobs, office workers, knowledge workers, white collar" as noted above.

But the willingness of employers to permit remote work is just...WILDLY all over the place, not particularly logical in pattern, and often "unofficial," or at the very least not consistently documented. There is literally no-way to meaningfully count who can work remotely, whether we're talking pre-pandemic, during the thick of the shutdown, or now that things are opening up.
posted by desuetude at 1:53 PM on July 7, 2021 [6 favorites]


You’re angling somewhere in the region of here’s how much commercial office space/commuting/urban planning etc operates around catering or accommodating this group? Because as many other people are saying, there’s huge socio-economic differences between say call center employees and software engineers. Treating the group as a monolith is going to require some very large hand waves.
posted by Jobst at 2:36 PM on July 7, 2021 [1 favorite]


Some research from early in the pandemic that tried to answer the “could work remotely” question - might give you some leads:
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/how-many-jobs-can-be-done-at-home/
posted by yarrow at 3:16 PM on July 7, 2021


25 Most Common Jobs in America Many of the Most common jobs in America can't be done remotely.
Remote?
No 1. Cashier
No 2. Food preparation worker
No 3. Janitor
No 4. Bartender
No 5. Server
No 6. Retail sales associate
No 7. Stocking associate
No 8. Laborer
__9. Customer service representative
__10. Office clerk
__11. Administrative assistant
__12. Line supervisor
__13. Medical assistant
No 14. Construction worker
__15. Bookkeeper
No 16. Mechanic
No 17. Carpenter
No 18. Electrician
__19. Registered nurse
__20. Marketing specialist
No 21. Police officer
No 22. Truck Driver
__23. Operations manager
__24. Lawyer
__25. Software developer

Many jobs that have to be done on-site are lower-paid and considered lower-skilled, or, at least, learned on the job. These are typically jobs with less authority, less flexibility. Exceptions like Surgeon are less common jobs.
posted by theora55 at 8:55 PM on July 7, 2021 [1 favorite]


This is going to be hard to pin down, because even in any single office, there could be:

- people working for the company full time with full benefits, as in your original description
- people working for the company part time, with lesser/no benefits commensurate to hours worked
- people working for third party agencies (contractors/temporary workers), who may or may not get benefits from their company but absolutely don't from the place where they perform work
- interns, who get paid dramatically less than full time staffers
- volunteers

Are all those "white collar workers"? I would argue no, even if they look like it from 10,000 feet. In this day and age, "white collar" could mean any one of a dozen or more different things, depending on employer, so be aware of that as you start to gather data, and understand what specific question(s) you're trying to answer.

There's really no way to deal with this as one group of people, either politically or demographically, because there are so many variations now that never used to exist.
posted by pdb at 9:13 PM on July 7, 2021 [1 favorite]


If what you're looking for is ultimately how many people work for employers who permit them to work remotely, I think that's a very different question than the one most people are answering so far. I have a job that fits all the criteria you've mentioned, and have been mostly remote for the last 15 months, but my job is requiring us all to go back to the office full time next week (for what I think are reasonably good reasons, though I understand many other people are being brought back to the office this summer for much less compelling reasons). So if what you're looking for is people whose employers permit remote work in non-pandemic times, I think you're better off searching for terms like "remote workers" or "work from home," because many, many white collar workers are not allowed to work from home, even if the nature of their work is such that they could physically get the work done at home.
posted by decathecting at 6:47 AM on July 8, 2021


I think 'remote work' is a derail here; don't see anything about that aspect of contemporary white-collar work in the OP's questions (which we haven't addressed):

What are their demographics, their politics?
Are there good articles/books about how this group differs from those in other countries and how this class of people was created?


We've answered the middle question, What are these people called, at least in the USA. For an international comparison, the equivalent term in Japan is Salaryman.
posted by Rash at 8:42 AM on July 8, 2021


We can estimate how many workers routinely work from home in the US using Census data. They also have this pandemic-related article that's informative.

In 2010, it was ~10% of workers. In 2020 during the pandemic, it was 37%.

In terms of politics and what to call them, George Packer in The Atlantic calls them Smart America.
posted by acridrabbit at 11:28 AM on July 8, 2021


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