zlacker

Saying blue collar work is "low-skilled" is probably inaccurate, I think the important distinction is that most blue collar work requires the person sitting at some physical location doing stuff, while significant amount of white collar jobs have a lower physical presence required.

Like if you work at an assembly line making widgets, the upper bound of productive work you do is proportional to the time you're physically there, so in this aspect it makes more sense for the employer to use that as a metric. In contrast a lot of tech jobs can be done remotely, sometimes if you're trying to solve a particularly nasty problem you don't even need an internet connection while you're thinking deeply about it.