Are white collar workers the new blue collar class?

THe Bengaluru-based 45-year-old engine driver did non require to be named. So, permit’s simply call him Vikram. He first joined Wipro in 2004, straight out of an engineering college in Nagpur. He was familiar with Java then. He moved to the ‘cloud’ because that is what it took to stay relevant. Then it was time to go ‘agile’. He changed jobs all the time. And each time, he negotiated a better salary. Each time, he believed the implicit contract held: keep learning, stay employable.Last month, the project he was on wound down. His bench period ends in six weeks.He is not looking for sympathy. He is looking for an answer to a question nobody seems willing to answer: what exactly am I supposed to learn next? It is the right question. The honest answer is the one the industry is not giving him.What the industry did not reward, and what it actively discouraged, was breadth.A Bengaluru-based Google Startups mentor, Shrinath V, who has spent years studying how technology organisations are structured, identifies the trap with uncomfortable precision. Companies defined roles so employees could be replaced quickly. A front-end developer, a back-end engineer, a systems architect: these are posts the company and the employees understand. To get better, you go deeper. It was a reasonable strategy.And that is how it was for over two decades. India’s IT services model built the most reliable escalator the middle class had ever seen. You got in at the bottom with your first degree, first job, first salary, and then you rode upward. The escalator had rules. Learn the new language when the old one gets replaced. Get certified. Move companies when the increment stalls.The industry built the cage. The engineers, rationally, walked into it.But here is the observation that should stop every senior technology professional cold.As Shrinath puts it, in medicine, seniority means deeper expertise. You begin as a general practitioner, move to specialist, then super-specialist. The longer you invest, the more irreplaceable you become. In software, it works in reverse. As you rise, you move away from the technical details into management layers, coordination and stakeholder meetings. That is why the industry has very few architects and an abundance of engineering managers.And now those management layers are precisely where the exposure is greatest. The people who climbed highest are the most vulnerable. Not despite their experience. Because of it.Vikram, to be clear, did everything right. That is what makes this hard.I know something about this from the other side. Journalism was disrupted, brutally, years before IT was. Algorithms started to curate the news. Platforms ate the advertising. Many newsrooms were wound down overnight with a severance cheque. The people who had spent twenty years learning to do one thing very well discovered that the market had stopped needing that thing in the volume it once did. Nobody wrote columns about their disruption either. You learned, eventually, that the only skill that held was the ability to think across domains, to connect things, to ask the question nobody else was asking, to be useful in ways that could not be automated because they depended on being specifically, irreducibly human. It is cold comfort. But it is the only comfort that is honest.TN Hari, now Executive Chairman of STEER World, who has hired more people than most in this industry, draws a distinction the reskilling conversation keeps blurring.“When Java gave way to Python, reskilling worked. The skill mix was changing but the jobs were there. Those who adapted survived. But when programming itself is being automated — not replaced by a different kind of programming, but automated — the reskilling argument collapses. You cannot reskill your way out of a category that is shrinking.”What Hari does not shy away from saying — and he is not entirely wrong — is that the market is amoral and always was. “When the times were good, this same 45-year-old knowledge worker ruthlessly negotiated fat salaries with every job change. They can’t cry foul when the same market forces that they profited from have swung in the other direction.”And Vikram is not the first person to discover this. The blue-collar worker in the informal sector never had an escalator. The woman stitching garments in a Tirupur factory, the man driving the last-mile delivery van, the daily wage worker who disappears when the contract ends. They have always lived with the precariousness that Vikram is only now discovering. Without the fat salaries. Without the certifications, the EMI-funded apartments, the LinkedIn profiles. And nobody wrote columns about their disruption.White-collar workers are the new blue-collar workers. The market was always amoral. They just didn’t notice because, for a long time, it was working in their favour.Welcome to reality. It is uncomfortable here. But most people already live in it.(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com)