NEW-COLLAR

adjective and noun (People and Society) adjective: Belonging to a supposed socio-economic group made up of white-collar workers who are more affluent and better educated than their parents. noun: A person who belongs to this group. Etymology: Formed by compounding: having a collar of a new kind. History and Usage: Ralph Whitehead, a Chicago reporter who later became a University professor, was one of many people writing in the seventies about the demographic changes that had taken place in the US since the war. He noticed that as a result of the declining manufacturing sector, large numbers of people from working-class ('blue-collar') backgrounds were moving into new areas of employment, and were as a result beginning to acquire new, supposedly more 'educated' values--and to vote differently. In a series of articles, Whitehead described this subgroup of 'baby boomers' in detail: the idea caught on amongst political commentators, and from about the mid eighties the new-collar worker became a stereotype, to be courted by advertisers and politicians like the less numerous (but even more affluent) yuppies. There has arisen what Whitehead calls the 'new-collar class'. New collars are to the middle class what yuppies are to the upper-middle class...New collars earn from $20,000 to $40,000. But what new collars lose in individual wealth when compared to yuppies, they gain back in numbers. New Republic 30 Dec. 1985, p. 20