Given my employment situation, I can readily sympathize with most of this. From a historical perspective it's easier to understand how the divides came about, though. College degrees were once meant as the prelude to two types of careers: Management, and The Professions (engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, and so on). If you were in one of the professions, you were basically running your own business, setting your own hours, etc. To a certain extent that's still true, though doctors are increasingly pressed for time.

Management got paid a salary, so they couldn't get paid overtime, but they were generally expected NOT TO HAVE TO WORK O.T. If you got your day's worth of work done early because you were really on a roll, you could leave early... and unless your job description explicitly stated it, you could not be forced to work nghts or weekends. That, quite obviously, is no longer the case -- but people still don't look to "trades" as an alternative.

I wonder if that's because people instinctively equate "blue collar" with "heavy lifting" and/or "retail"... neither of which pays well, the former is beyond the physical abilities of many (including myself), and the latter has work schedules from hell.

I don't argue with the text of what DuBois was saying... but I take issue with the fact that it was him saying it, seeing as W.E.B. was one of the folks SELLING that line to blacks way back when.