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A New York City ferry terminal in the late 1860s: Commuters issue forth into Lower Manhattan’s maze of streets. They move in distinct waves through the morning. First come the working-class employees in their flannel shirts, off to jobs in factories and shops for little pay. Then around 7 a.m., the crowd shifts, and the clothing with it. “The shirts of the passengers begin to whiten and raiment to improve,” the New-York Tribune reporter and occasional Atlantic contributor Junius Henri Browne observed. These were the office workers—the “salesmen, accountants, clerks, most of whom are young and seem hopeful.” Unlike the manual laborers before them, these men strode confidently into their days, carried forward by visions of partnerships, financial success, and “princely incomes.”
Browne was witnessing the great sartorial and social divide that would define basic American ideas about work and status. Although not a sociologist in any modern sense, he was reckoning with a question that would occupy academics and theorists in the century to come: What separated the hopeful clerks from the mechanics who arrived before them? What did the white shirt, later reduced to just the white collar, signify? As Browne saw, it marked not just a different kind of work but also a different set of expectations. Performing mental rather than manual labor promised comfort, affluence, and status. But he wondered how many people would ever attain the prosperity and standing that they coveted—and whether they were all just feeding themselves on “the sweet fruit” of their “own imagining.”
By the middle of the 20th century, the share of white-collar workers was rapidly overtaking that of blue-collar counterparts. Their affluence shaped consumer society, popular culture, higher education, and a new suburban geography. Questions lingered—were they too comfortable, too conformist, too caught up in their status?—but from some perspectives, they seemed poised to rise even further. Knowledge work, a term first coined in 1959 by the management theorist Peter F. Drucker, described the idea that some white-collar employees’ specialized education and job-related expertise would become prized resources, giving the workers value that companies could not replace—a proposition that he later argued would be cemented by the internet. Now, four years into the age of artificial intelligence, the certainties about office labor are fading, and the questions returning. If knowledge, expertise, and other hallmarks of “brain-work” no longer have the same value, what will remain of the distinctions that once set white-collar workers apart?
In the postwar years, academic studies, magazine articles, novels, and movies puzzled over the new class of office employees. They didn’t own farms, shops, or businesses, but their salaried status distinguished them from hourly wage workers. They relied on employers for their livelihoods yet generally rejected unions and seldom thought of themselves as laborers. Such conditions placed them in an ambiguous place in American society: economically dependent, socially aspirational, neither owners nor willing to identify themselves as ordinary workers. In 1957, an anonymous labor organizer lamented the impossibility of unionizing offices, writing in Harper’s that “the white collar worker is just a different breed.”
What these new conditions of work and status were doing to people’s psychology was an open question. In 1951, the sociologist C. Wright Mills published an anatomy of the “white-collar world” in which he almost pitied his subjects as “cheerful robots” who had traded autonomy for middle-class status. The massive management structures in which they worked provided safety and comfort but made them people pleasers and conformists afflicted by anxiety and emptiness, he argued: The white-collar worker “is always somebody’s man,” a small creature who is acted upon “but does not rise.” He wasn’t alone in his analysis. Six years later, when Charles J. Rolo reviewed a trio of books in this genre for The Atlantic, he asserted that “the daring young man” had been “eclipsed by the earth-bound young man who settles for mediocrity on the installment plan.”
The concept of knowledge work offered another theory of the office that would prove remarkably enduring. Where Mills and other critics had seen dependence and lonely drudgery, Drucker saw the possibility of power for a subset of the white-collar class. “Knowledge workers,” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1994, “will give the emerging knowledge society its character, its leadership, its social profile.” And far from undermining knowledge workers’ status, the internet and the “Information Revolution” would crown it. Writing in the magazine in 1999, Drucker argued that the world taking shape would belong to workers who could synthesize knowledge and analysis. “The key is not electronics,” he explained. “It is cognitive science.” Enhanced by computers, knowledge workers would become so powerful, and so essential, that companies would have to “bribe” them to stay.
Nearly 30 years later, such confidence is in short supply. The advent of a new breed of cheerful robots in the workplace—actual robots; notoriously agreeable—has threatened to disrupt not just the functions of white-collar and knowledge workers, but also their long-standing social markers. Speculation about the implications of AI for white-collar labor abounds. High-school students consider entering the trades over attending university; college students fret over the market for entry-level jobs, while some drop out to vibe code apps. Seasoned workers squint sidelong at AI visionaries’ predictions that they won’t be needed much longer.
Whether AI ultimately destroys office jobs, creates new forms of knowledge work, or does something in between remains impossible to say. What’s clear is that after generations of white-collar work seeming to offer a stable path to status and security, the bargain again feels uncertain. The question that Browne asked on the ferry dock presents itself anew: Who are these people, and where do they think they’re going?
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