The Value of Physical Work

After reading the two articles, I personally believe that Blue Collar Brilliance by Mike Rose presents the better argument out of the two. In this article, Mike argues that blue collar jobs are a good source of learning about the world and the people living in it. He begins the article by describing what work was like for his mother when he was a child. He says that she was a waitress in Los Angeles who worked in a variety of coffee shops and restaurants. He talks about her work defining to him what work was like for most adults at the time, and uses his personal experience to support the argument that physical work and competence went hand in hand, and that physical work requires intelligence just as much as it requires strength.  He describes how his mom gained knowledge in order to do her work as well as possible, and uses her creation of memory strategies in order to remember all of her tasks while on the job to support the argument. This was important for not only completing her work, but also for dealing with the customers who came to the restaurants. As Mike puts it, the customers would come to the restaurants for a wide variety of needs, and his mom’s tip depended on her understanding what those needs were and being able to address them appropriately. He says that this understand of the thought processes of the customers was what made her so interested in human psychology,  and that she learned many things about the way people thought while working as a waitress. To support his main argument that he is making, he reveals that his mother never went beyond the seventh grade while in school, and that his father did not go much farther academically. In fact, Mike was the only one to go to college. He reveals this in order to show that formal education is not, despite popular belief, required in order for a person to be intelligent, and that physical work could actually do a really good job at serving somebody’s intelligence. What makes Mike’s argument the better one out of the two arguments is the fact that he uses personal experiences in order to support what he says in his article.