working-class heroes
Blue-collar role models
Working-class heroes are people celebrated for embodying the struggles, values, and dignity of laborers and ordinary people.
The phrase gained currency from John Lennon's 1970 song, which used it ironically to critique the idea that individual success stories offer real escape from class constraints.
It can be sincere—honoring those who advocate for workers' rights or rise from humble origins—or sardonic, suggesting such figures are tokens that leave systemic inequalities intact: Politicians love trotting out working-class heroes at campaign rallies.
- blue-collarManual labor workforce
- underdogsCompetitors expected to fail
- laborersWorkers doing physical tasks
- factoryIndustrial production facility
- shop floorIndustrial production workspace
punch clock · nine to five · union · labor movement · struggle · hard day's work · grit · solidarity · toil · salt-of-the-earth · everyman · dignity · sweat · dirt under nails · calloused · grassroots · downtrodden · hardscrabble
- Labor Movementlabor leaders, union organizers, union leaders, labor activists, labor movement
- Soviet LiteratureSolzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Pasternak, Babel, Grossman
- Socialist LiteratureCommunist Manifesto, Das Kapital, Marx, Engels, proletariat
working-class heroestrust fund babies
Inheritors of managed wealth
aristocrats · blue bloods · landed gentry · patricians · hereditary nobility
working-class heroesrobber barons
Exploitative nineteenth-century capitalists
exploiters · plutocrats · corporate raiders · fat cats · strikebreakers
working-class heroescaptains of industry
Powerful business magnates
working, class, heroes, works, worked, worker, workers, workable, unworkable