Response to Question 4

Merriam Webster online defines blue collar jobs as jobs that require work clothes or protective clothing. Blue collar workers perform manual labor, while white collar professionals usually work in an office. Robert Reich suggests that this way of categorizing labor is inadequate for two reasons:

1)In our current information centered economy, many blue collar jobs are disappearing

2) The distinction between what we associate with blue and white collar jobs is becoming blurred. (For example, most jobs now are requiring the use of computers and internet).

As an alternative, he offers three new categories: routine production workers, in-person service workers, and symbolic analysts (22), but the difference between these three groups also seems blurry to me. My question is, what makes each of these groups distinct from the other two and why is it important to come up with general categories for labor at all?