Absenteeism: Frequent absence from the workplace. Although this may jeopardize an employee's prospects at work, fear of that jeopardy can conversely compel sick and contagious employees to come to work and spread communicable diseases, leading to greater reductions in productivity.

Alienation (Marx): In Karl Marx's philosophy, alienation is the estrangement of or antagonism between things that naturally belong together. In particular, the capitalist mode of production results in alienation because workers neither own the means of production nor direct their own goals and activities.

At-will employment: A doctrine in American labor law stating that if there is no contract defining a term of employment and no collective bargaining agreement in place, employment can be terminated by either the employer or the employee without liability. There are certain exceptions established in common and statutory law, varying by state. Notable exceptions established by federal statute forbid the firing of an employee if the firing is discriminatory on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or handicap status; is a retaliatory action against certain protected actions or, to prevent employees from forming or joining a union.

Barriers to entry: Obstacles that increase the difficulty of entering a market—whether speaking of the obstacles a company faces in entering a particular market sector (which can include economies of scale, regulatory barriers, large up-front investments, and restrictive practices of potential competitors) or the obstacles a worker faces in entering a particular job market (such as the supply/demand imbalance faced by new lawyers, the licensing requirements of commercial drivers, or the significant up-front time investment and educational requirements of a doctor).

Blue collar: Involving manual labor. Blue-collar work may be skilled or unskilled. Originally, one of the distinctions between blue-collar and white-collar work was that blue-collar workers were more likely to be paid an hourly wage, whereas white-collar workers were more likely to be salaried. This generalization is much less true than it used to be. As the white-collar working class has expanded, so has the number of blue-collar workers who are salaried or paid by the project.

Bonus: A payment made in addition to base salary or wages.

Brain drain: The large-scale departure from an area of skilled, knowledgeable, or educated workers, preventing their area from benefiting from those skills. A problem for some states, where students graduating from the in-state colleges subsidized by state money depart for jobs in [Page 1016]other states, it was also a perpetual problem for the Soviet Union, because the command economy provided too little incentive for educated workers to remain.

Break: A portion of a shift during which employees take time off from their job. Meal breaks, for instance, are legally mandated in many states for employees who work shifts of a minimum length of time; however, these breaks may not be paid time. Coffee breaks and smoking breaks are commonly brief paid informal breaks, often not at prescribed times; in California and a small number of other states, snack breaks of at least 10 minutes are legally required for every 3.5 hours worked. In Commonwealth countries, it is still traditional to have an official tea break—sometimes two—at specific times of the day, during which employees gather for tea, accompanying snacks, and socializing.

Bureaucracy: A hierarchy of officials (unelected, in the case of a government) who administer the rules and functions of their organization or government. Typically, bureaucracies are noted for their highly specialized hierarchies delineating specific areas of authority and responsibility, and specific procedures with which to respond to circumstances.

Call center: A centralized location for making and receiving telephone calls. Call centers may be internal, but increasingly the term is used to refer to call centers used by companies that outsource the handling of these calls, whether outgoing calls for telemarketing, bill collection, and other purposes, or incoming calls for customer service and technical support.

Career: The course of a person's work life, which may transpire across multiple occupations.

Child labor: The employment of children, typically referring to children under 16 or 14. The term is used almost exclusively as a condemnation; that is, legal and presumed ethical work situations such as those of child actors or young teenagers engaged in farm work (legal in the United States for ages 12 and up) would be more likely referred to as “child or youth employment.” Historically, child labor has been significantly cheaper than adult labor and has been exploited as a cheap source of unskilled manual labor.

Cognitive bias: A pattern of inaccurate judgment or interpretation as a result of evolved mental behavior. There are many such individually identified biases, for instance confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions; hindsight bias, the tendency to consider past events to have been predictable or obvious outcomes; and anchoring, the tendency to rely too heavily on a past experience or piece of information when making decisions. Cognitive biases can be driving forces in political rhetoric but are also important in interpersonal communication in and out of the workplace, managerial decision-making processes, and the day-to-day business of many occupations.

Collective bargaining: Negotiations between employers and employees during which designated representatives of the employees (typically from their labor union) conduct negotiations on their behalf. The collective agreements adopted as a result of such negotiations pertain to matters such as compensation (wages, overtime, vacation days, and other paid leave), work hours, working conditions, and other issues. Often, such agreements are binding for a specific, agreed-upon period of time, at which point a new round of negotiations renews or adjusts the agreement. Strikes (or lockouts initiated by employers) may result when agreement cannot be reached.

Command economy: An economy in which the authority to make decisions about production, distribution, and allocation of resources (including labor) is held by a central government authority. In the 21st century, with European communism having failed and the People's Republic of China adopting free market reforms, command economies are rare. Cuba and North Korea are notable examples, and Saudi Arabia's economy is heavily directed by its government.

Constructive dismissal: The resignation of an employee because of intolerable working conditions caused by the employer's behavior; in some jurisdictions, a resignation is only a constructive [Page 1017]dismissal if the employer intentionally or knowingly created those conditions. Such employers may be compelled to pay compensation.

Consumer: The final user of a product or service.

Contingent work: Work that differs significantly from the standard 20th to 21st century relationship between employee and employer in its security, especially when spoken of as a social ill. The term is not always defined the same way. It generally includes temporary jobs, but not all users of the term agree on whether to consider all part-time work as contingent work or how to classify work that is paid on a project basis. All would agree, for instance, that students’ summer jobs are contingent work—work that typically has little long-term relevance to their career. The classification of freelance or contract work is more difficult. Increases in the number of people in the workforce engaged in contingent work is seen as a social ill because of the lack of job security and the usual lack of benefits such as insurance or pensions.

Corporate social responsibility: A business model that incorporates self-regulation. Philanthropy is the most common expression of corporate social responsibility, and reducing the corporate carbon footprint through the purchase of carbon credits is increasingly common.

Cottage industry: An industry that consists of producers working from their homes, usually part time. The term originally referred to sewing and other household manufacturing industries, which were displaced by the textiles industry during the early Industrial Revolution. Now used loosely to refer to various part-time revenue-generating endeavors, such as selling goods online on eBay or Etsy. It typically does not include telecommuting jobs or freelance at-home work such as writing, data entry, or graphic design.

Cultural capital: Nonfinancial assets that might promote social mobility, such as educational or intellectual resources.

Day labor: A form of contingent work that pays for one day of labor at a time with no guarantee of further work. Employment agencies provide short-term contracts for manual labor, but day laborers may also be typists, computer programmers, telephone operators, or other workers whose labor is needed on a very short-term basis to complete a specific project.

Deindustrialization: The reduction of industrial capacity, particularly in heavy industry or manufacturing. Deindustrialization is usually understood as a long-term decline in manufacturing (whether measured in terms of output, balance of trade of manufactured goods, or employment). Deindustrialization was a common phenomenon in many industrialized countries in the latter third of the 20th century.

Deskilling: Reducing the amount of skilled labor used in an industry or company by introducing technologies or other means by which tasks can be performed by unskilled workers, in order to reduce labor costs (not only in the form of wages but also by reducing barriers to entry in order to reduce the bargaining power of existing employees). Not a new phenomenon, deskilling was accomplished by the introduction of the assembly line, which allowed complex goods to be assembled by workers who needed to be made familiar with only one procedure.

Domestic worker: A domestic worker, or simply a “domestic,” works in an employer's household, typically engaged in work such as housekeeping, childc are, and/or cooking. Live-in domestics are common, with room and board provided in addition to their salary; in such cases, servants’ quarters are typically apart from the family's sleeping quarters, sometimes in a basement or attic or located near the kitchen.

Downsizing: A common euphemism for the temporary or permanent termination of employees to increase or maintain profits or in response to a decline in business.

Economic efficiency: A measure of the production of goods relative to resource usage.

Emotional labor: An aspect of work in certain professions in which the display of certain emotions [Page 1018]is part of the job—such as the “bedside manner” of health care professionals or the neutrality and objectivity of defense lawyers. Although emotional labor can be key to job success, it is less likely to be explicitly recognized as such but rarely is taught.

Employee: A worker engaged by an employee for specific duties, in a defined relationship. Not every relationship in which a person performs labor in exchange for monetary compensation is an employee-employer relationship. For instance, a plumber hired to fix a faucet in your home is not your employee; waiters, though they take tips from the customer, are the employees of the restaurant rather than the customer; and an increasing number of workers perform their work on a freelance contract basis, remaining self-employed. One reason the distinction is important is that certain rights and benefits are typically accrued only by employees, such as health insurance coverage, pension benefits, job security, and the ability to bargain collectively.

Entrepreneur: A person who launches or runs a business enterprise (in a leadership capacity, not merely as an investor).

Equal opportunity employment: Employment that does not discriminate against employees on the basis of race, sex, creed, religion, color, national origin, age (for those 40 or over), a certain range of disabilities under certain conditions, family history and genetic information, or military history.

Extractive industries: Industries engaged in extracting raw materials or other commodities from natural resources, including agriculture, fisheries, mining, and the oil industry. Extractive activities (sometimes called the primary sector) were the largest economic sector until the Industrial Revolution saw a boom in manufacturing (the secondary sector).

Fair trade: A market-based social activist movement promoting trade practices that promote social and environmental sustainability, particularly in exports from developing countries to developed ones. Fair trade movements and product certification programs have been the most prominent in product categories where most or all of the production is done in the developing world for environmental or historical reasons, such as for coffee and tea.

Flextime: A work schedule requiring a certain total number of hours (daily, weekly, or monthly) but giving employees more control over when those work hours are performed, than in the traditional 9-to-5 workday.

Full employment: Theoretically, full employment would mean an employment rate of 100 percent, and some economists support this definition. Others insist that true full employment is impossible because of search unemployment and undesirable because a level of natural unemployment just over 0 percent is necessary to control inflation.

Globalization: The increasingly dense web of globe-spanning connections between people as a result of economic activity and cultural products.

Goldbricking: Creating the illusion of activity and productivity while actually slacking off. In white-collar workplaces, goldbricking has become more common thanks to widespread Internet access, prompting the use of proxy servers to block access to Internet resources for which there is no work-appropriate application.

Golden parachute: Significant benefits given to an employee (traditionally an executive) upon termination, including stock options and cash bonuses—a tactic that makes it easier to compete for executives and dissuades frivolous takeovers.

Graduate unemployment: Unemployment among workers with college or university degrees.

Habitus: Skills, mannerisms, and dispositions that are acquired through experience.

Headhunter: A third-party recruiter with a stable of clients consisting of businesses with job openings for which the headhunter will find suitable candidates.

Homosocial: A same-sex social relationship; or a group, situation, or circumstance in which social interaction is principally same-sex.

Human resources: Although the term human resources technically refers to the individuals who make up the workforce of a business, it is more typically used in reference to the human resources management (HR) division of that business: the workers responsible for hiring, training, and assessing employees; overseeing aspects of the business's organizational culture; and ensuring compliance with employment laws.

Hysteresis: The increasing of the rate of unemployment below which inflation accelerates as a result of periods of high unemployment.

Indentured servant: A person conducting work for a predetermined period of time—usually at least three years—during which the worker is not paid except in room, board, and similar expenses, in return for the employer paying some large expense up front—especially travel expenses. Indentured servitude was the manner by which many colonists paid for their passage to the New World.

Industry: Businesses of like type, for example the electronics industry or the publishing industry. Industry can also be a synonym for manufacturing.

Intern: A worker, usually young and/or a student, who receives on-the-job training. In unpaid internships, training is the only compensation; paid interns are typically paid less than their workmates.

Job fair: An event during which employers and recruiters meet with prospective job seekers.

Jobless recovery: A macroeconomic recovery in which the economy grows following a period of decline, while employment levels either remain low or continue to decline.

Knowledge worker: A worker whose chief contribution is knowledge of a specific subject area and ability to apply that knowledge in meaningful ways.

Labor force participation rate: The ratio between the number of participating workers (people who are employed or seeking employment) and the size of the population of the same age range (or other characteristics, such as gender or ethnicity). Lean: Lean production or simply lean is a term introduced in the 1990s for production practices that reduce the amount of work needed to produce value. The emphasis on value separates lean production from practices that simply maximize profit through shoddy work. Lean practices derive from the Toyota Production System, itself influenced by earlier movements like Taylorism.

Living wage: The minimum income necessary for a worker to meet basic needs. In many parts of the world, including portions of the United States, the legally mandated minimum wage is lower than the living wage.

Lockstep compensation: A system in which employee salaries are based purely on seniority.

Logistics: Oversight of the movement of products from the point of origin to the point of sale, including the management of inventory, warehousing, packaging, and transportation. Although logistics can often be handled in-house, aspects of it are increasingly outsourced to other firms.

Make-work job: A job that consumes more value (in whatever form) than it creates.

Management: The planning, organizing, and directing of an organization, or the employees responsible for such, collectively (as in “management decided to adopt an open plan office”). Sufficiently large organizations usually organize managers into three tiers of decreasing size: low-level (supervisors, project leaders, foremen), middle level (department and branch managers), and top level (executives). Management is an increasingly diverse field, giving birth to a number of profitable cottage industries like management consulting and management information systems.

Market economy: An economy in which decisions about production and investment are determined by supply and demand. Most real-world economies are mixed economies, containing some amount of regulation and government control, even in the most capitalist countries.

McJob: A low-paying unskilled job with little advancement potential and little reward, such [Page 1020]as a fast-food job. The term was popularized by Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X.

Means of production: The instruments of labor (tools, factories, and infrastructure) and subjects of labor (raw materials and natural resources) used for the production of wealth. In a basic example, the means of production are the soil, seeds, and shovels used by laborers to grow crops. The means of production and laborers’ relationship to those means are central to the works of Karl Marx.

Micromanagement: Management coupled with detrimentally close observation (“hovering”) of employees, or in which the manager makes or influences all the decisions involved in the process without delegating control of the details to others.

Minimum wage: The lowest remuneration an employer may legally pay to workers. In the United States, there is a federal minimum wage, and in all but five states an additional state minimum wage. (The higher wage prevails.) Minimum wages are often set lower for tipped employees, as in the federal level, which is often cited as the main factor for tipping being ethically compulsory.

Moonlighting: Holding a secondary job in addition to one's primary job, especially when the primary job is itself a full-time job.

New Economy: A term popularized in the 1980s and 1990s to describe the transition from the manufacturing-based economy of the bulk of the 20th century to the service-based economy that drove the dot-com bubble.

No call, no show: An employee's absence from work without notifying the supervisor or employer; frequently grounds for disciplinary action if there are not extenuating circumstances explaining the failure to notify.

Nonprofit: An organization that uses revenue after expenses to further specific plans; charities, for instance, are nearly always nonprofit organizations, and instead of distributing profit, they use surplus revenue to pursue their charitable aims or bank them in order to ensure continued operations. Many nonprofits rely on unpaid or low-paid labor.

Occupational disease: Chronic ailments that result from work activity, such as pneumoconiosis among coal miners. There is a long history of chronic ailments that are strongly associated with specific occupations, in both blue-collar and white-collar lines of work. In many cases, employees who contract such an ailment are entitled to workers’ compensation; compensation is limited or not offered in some countries, and in some cases, workers may face challenges in forcing the employer or industry to acknowledge the correlation between work conditions and the ailment.

Onboarding: The process of getting new employees “on board,” that is, of imparting to them the necessary skills and knowledge to function in the workplace, and of familiarizing them with necessary procedures and etiquette. Onboarding is not the same as training, particularly in that it often deals with skills and procedures that are particular to the business or work environment rather than skills that are transferable across the industry. Simple examples of such information imparted through onboarding include the procedure for requesting a vacation day, information about fire and other emergency evacuation procedures specific to the building, and etiquette for common areas such as the break room—as well as orientations pertaining to sexual harassment and other conduct policies.

Open plan: Workspace designs that favor large open spaces over enclosed offices. Open plan offices may or may not include high- or low-paneled cubicles.

Operations management: The design and oversight of production processes and business operations.

Opportunity cost: The cost of an action in terms of the value of mutually exclusive actions; all other things being equal, the opportunity cost of raising an acre of corn instead of an acre of soybeans is the value of the acre of soybeans. Opportunity costs can be considered in nonmonetary terms as [Page 1021]well: before the 21st century and the advent of digital video recorders, the opportunity cost of watching one television show was the lost pleasure of watching one of the other shows airing in the same time slot.

Organizational culture: The collective behavior of the workers in an organization, especially patterns of assumptions, habits, routines and rituals, power structures, and social rewards.

Organized labor: Labor unions and their members.

Outsource: To contract business functions to a third party. Though not a new phenomenon, outsourcing is especially associated with recent trends like the contracting of third-party call centers, and with the use of foreign third-party contractors (saving money by eliminating American jobs that would have been paid at a higher wage). In this sense, outsourcing is often viewed as the white-collar complement to the trend of manufacturing corporations closing down factories in the United States in favor of new factories in low-wage countries.

Overtime: Work performed in excess of normal working hours. Most countries do not allow employers to force employees to work excessively long shifts or too many hours in a week, and exceeding a certain threshold may require compensating the employee at a higher than normal rate. In the United States, public sector employees may be given time off in exchange for overtime hours worked rather than overtime pay; that arrangement is not legal in the private sector.

Panoptic (Foucault): Allowing the viewing of all parts. Social theorist Michel Foucault used the panopticon, a circular prison built with an outer wall and central tower to maximize surveillance of prisoners, as a metaphor for uses of power and observation. The 20th and 21st centuries have been increasingly panoptic, originally with the use of closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public and commercial spaces and more recently in the use of online tracking cookies and other information collecting and reselling.

Parental leave: Paid or unpaid time off to care for a child (typically a newly born one), including maternity leave (the most commonly available), paternity leave, and adoption leave. The United States is one of the only countries that does not require employers to provide paid time off for new parents.

Participating worker: A person who is employed or actively seeking employment.

Pension: A fixed periodic amount paid to a retired worker.

Per diem: A daily allowance given to an employee for expenses in specific circumstances, such as working away from home. From the Latin for “per day.”

Postindustrial: The phase of economic history after a manufacturing-based economy, in which the economy has transitioned from the production of goods to the provision of services.

Pregnancy discrimination: The unfair treatment of pregnant women by employers or potential employers, especially firing or refusing to hire them because of their pregnancy or intention to become pregnant.

Procurement: The acquisition of goods or services, especially for use by a business.

Profession: An occupation requiring specialized educational training. Historically, the “three learned professions” were divinity, medicine, and law, all of which required higher education at a time when few workers pursued it. By the 20th century, teaching, librarianship, social work, and health care specialties like pharmacy, optometry, veterinary medicine, and nursing were all considered professions. Other professions today include psychology, journalism, engineering, piloting, architecture, and medical and finance fields. In most cases, professions require some sort of licensing or certification and/or membership in a professional organization, and they may be governed by an industry or government regulatory body.

Professionalization: The process of turning an occupation into a profession, increasing its [Page 1022]prestige and power as well as the skill, value, and accountability of its practitioners.

Red tape: Regulations requiring paperwork and procedures sufficient to significantly slow down a process, or even to make it complex enough to constitute a barrier to entry. In many circumstances, red tape develops naturally as the result of bodies of regulations and requirements that are developed independently without consideration for the whole procedural environment.

Remittance: Money sent home by workers abroad. The ability to help support one's family from abroad is one reason workers migrate to developed countries; remittances play a significant part in the economies of developing countries, constituting a larger financial inflow than international aid. Most remittances are sent from the United States and Saudi Arabia. Ireland in the 19th century was heavily dependent on remittances.

Restructuring: The reorganization of the operational or legal structures of a company. Restructuring often follows major changes to the business such as bankruptcy or a merger.

Right to work: The human right to work and the right not to be prevented from doing so, recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Right-to-work law: A statute that prohibits agreements between unions and employers that require membership in the union or to pay fees or dues to the union.

Salary: Fixed payment to a worker on a periodic basis, rather than a wage paid on the basis of specific hours worked.

Scientific management: The management approach pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the later decades of the Industrial Revolution, in which standardization of production practices, mass production, time-and-motion studies, and the elimination of redundancies were used to maximize efficiency.

Search unemployment: The time a worker spends between jobs, searching for or transitioning to a new job. Some amount of search unemployment is inevitable: even when a worker leaves a job by choice, there may be time spent moving to a different city or waiting for an employment period to begin, as with education jobs and the school year. Because of this, even under the healthiest conditions, full employment can never be reached.

Sector: A segment of the economy. There are various ways to speak of economic sectors. Often “sector” is used to indicate a broader category than “industry”—the “electronics industry,” but the “manufacturing sector.” Economies are also divided into the public (government-run), private, and voluntary (nonprofit) sectors, which are sometimes bound by different laws and regulations. Some economists speak of the economy as consisting of the primary (extractive), secondary (transformative—manufacturing), tertiary (service), and quaternary (information-handling) sectors.

Self-sufficiency: Personal or collective autonomy, insofar as no support or interaction with the outside world is required for survival. Self-sufficient economies are autarkies, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban or Spain for part of Francisco Franco's reign. Self-sufficiency is a goal of some households and communes in various modern American movements. By its nature, self-sufficiency reverses the historical trend of specialization and division of labor that has intertwined people throughout the world through trade ties and other interdependencies.

Service sector: The “soft” part of the economy, producing intangible goods known as services, including health care, telecommunications, banking and finance, education, retail, real estate, and entertainment.

Severance package: Pay and benefits given to an employee upon ending employment, including payment for unused vacation time or sick leave. In some cases, the severance agreement may require certain things from the ex-employee as an attached condition, such as an agreement not to work for a competitor until a certain amount of time has passed or waiving the right to sue the employer.

Sexual harassment: Inappropriate workplace behavior with a sexually charged or otherwise inappropriate component, including unwelcome comments or touching; remarks about sex, gender, or sexual persuasion; and notably any offer to exchange rewards for sexual favors.

Sick building syndrome: A combination of ailments associated with a workplace, especially an office building, and typically caused by poor air quality, molds, industrial chemicals, and a lack of fresh air.

Social capital: Nonphysical assets derived from social networks, relationships, and connections to other individuals and groups; a college education is cultural capital (c.f.), whereas graduating from an alma mater associated with “the old boys network” is social capital.

Soft skills: Social skills, traits, and behaviors that contribute to the ability to effectively interact with other people, both in and outside the workplace.

Strike: A work stoppage by employees as a form of protest.

Subsistence agriculture: Farming focused on providing the food and other agricultural products necessary for a family to live. Subsistence farmers live using what they grow rather than exchanging it for currency to meet their needs; surpluses are often used for a small amount of trade. Although family farms still exist in Europe and North America—and as late as the 1950s, many of them continued to make their own clothes and some other goods—subsistence farming almost completely disappeared from the West in the early 20th century and today is found only in the developing world. It was the dominant human occupation from the Neolithic revolution until a few centuries ago.

Superwoman: In sociology, “superwoman” (especially in phrases like “the superwoman complex”) refers to the idea that has developed especially since the 1970s that women's work roles have been adopted in addition to, rather than replacing, women's home roles—that the increased presence of women in the workforce has not been coupled with a reduction in the amount of work women are expected to contribute as housewives and mothers.

Sweatshop: Legally defined as a place of employment in violation of more than one federal or state labor law pertaining to minimum wage, overtime, child labor, workers’ compensation, industry regulation, and occupational safety. In particular, the term is associated with exploitative workplaces where poor or dangerous working conditions keep costs low.

Taylorism: See scientific management.

Telecommuting: Working from home through the use of telecommunications; usually, this means the employee works on a computer at home, perhaps e-mailing workmates in the office or accessing information on a company server. However, some call centers divert calls to phones at employees’ homes.

Temp: A temporary employee, working full or part time. Although seasonal work is temporary employment, use of the noun temp to refer to an employee is generally reserved for temporary workers hired through an employment agency. The cost of maintaining a temp is less than the cost of a permanent employee because of the structure of benefits and taxes. Temps by nature have no job security and little to no recourse if fired; for this reason, companies will sometimes use temps in long-term situations for which a permanent employee would be better suited.

Tip: A gratuity paid to a service worker. Customs surrounding tips vary greatly from country to country.

Toyota Production System (TPS): A form of scientific management practiced by the Toyota Corporation of Japan beginning around 1948. Unlike Frederick Taylor's scientific management, TPS explicitly identified mutual trust and respect for co-workers among the underlying principles of the “Toyota Way.”

Underemployment: Employment that is insufficient for the worker's needs or desires—especially [Page 1024]employment that offers fewer hours than the employee wishes to work, or employment for which the employee is overqualified.

Undocumented worker: A worker in violation of immigration laws.

Whistleblower: Someone who informs an authority or the general public about illegal activities, especially activities transpiring in their own organization.

White collar: Refers to professional or educated work, as opposed to manual labor.

Working poor: Workers (and their families) whose income falls below the poverty line.