It's more than professional identity: it's social identity too. Conservative society has an answer for everything: how to be a man or woman, who is appropriate to marry, why you shouldn't worry about death or global warming and what is a socially appropriate job, so retraining to do something that comes from outside society is an even bigger identity threat.

>>Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional.

It's not sudden. At all. The coal industry has been on the decline for quite a while now, and green jobs have been on the rise.

> Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional.

As if blue collar workers are not professionals.

By the usual definition, they're not – the noun "professional" means a white-collar worker.

Well, color me surprised, I always figured the usual definition of 'professional' means he or she who is schooled in their art and using that knowledge professionally, not 'those who don't get their hands dirty'.

I find it hard to see a machinist not as a professional but fine, I'll change my internal dictionary.

Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional it looks as if this is a cultural difference.

Edit: thinking about this a bit longer, it seems clear that the distinction was made by those who don't get their hands dirty at the expense of those who do, and it seems extremely demeaning to me. As if the 'white/blue collar worker' distinction wasn't bad enough now people who spend a lifetime acquiring the knowledge to do their jobs are not even allowed to be called - or call themselves - professionals.

And then there's the sense of professional versus amateur. I suspect your internal dictionary is just fine, and we're running into different senses of the use of professional.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/professional

Doctors are professionals, miners are tradesmen, artists are craftsmen. They're just legacy words. If there is any cultural respect or stigma, it's mostly tied to income not the work itself.

> it seems clear that the distinction was made by those who don't get their hands dirty at the expense of those who do

That doesn't seem clear to me at all.

Check the coalminers dictionary on your shelf.

I don't understand what you mean.