Zane Rhyne

Mrs. Layton

English 1010

December 7th, 2018

Summary of Mike Rose’s “Blue-Collar Brilliance”

In Mike Rose’s essay “Blue-Collar Brilliance,” he reveals the brilliance of the minds that

work within the blue-collar job industry while also displacing the beliefs surrounding those

employed in blue-collar jobs.

According to Rose, many blue-collar workers haven’t finished school. His own mother

Rosie dropped out in 7th grade and his uncle Joe dropped out in 9th grade. Even so, they thrived

in their industries: by multitasking, they learned how to work smart and efficiently, how to solve

problems on the go, and learned about human behavior, which, in Joe’s case, helped him

improve the efficiency of those who worked under him while simultaneously reducing their

workload and stress. Furthermore, despite Joe receiving no prior education on how the machines

under his supervision worked, he understood “their quirks and operational capabilities;” through

workplace experience alone, he learned how to use the tools around him.

Rose has studied the blue-collar industry and has learned how those employed use “both

body and brain.” He notes that most “routine actions” are learned through peer cooperation and

observation - seemingly simple tasks such as tool and material handling requires knowledge of

what each can be used for and what their limits are; this knowledge is often provided by co-

workers. As such, Rose states that most physical work is “social and interactive”. Rose also

mentions the extent to which communication, math, and basic literacy is involved with blue-

collar jobs: the blue-collar workplace is filled with numbers - “on tools and gauges, as
measurements,” and on numerous other objects; these numbers are often involved in workplace

calculations. He notes how workers often draw basic diagrams to explain concepts to co-workers

(something that Rose calls “visual jargon”). Blue-collar literacy is not often considered, and as

such, it is easy to be surprised how common writing and in the workplace is.

I conclude this summary by paraphrasing Rose’s own conclusion: Intelligence is often

associated “with formal education.” As such, it’s a common belief that work “requiring less

schooling requires less intelligence.” Unfortunately, believing work to be mindless will

negatively affect the work we create in the future. As Rose strongly put it, “if we think that

whole categories of people—identified by class or occupation—are not that bright, then we

reinforce social separations and cripple our ability to talk across cultural divides”; these

generalizations may deeply affect how we, as a society, consider the quality of work produced.
 Work Cited

Rose, Mike. “Blue-Collar Brilliance.” The American Scholar: Blue-Collar Brilliance -

Mike Rose, The American Scholar, 1 June 2009, theamericanscholar.org/blue-collar-

brilliance/#.XAsWDGhKguU.