The assumption is that blue collar work is the stuff that gets automated away. The reality is that blue collar workers are getting more productive instead but are still essential. And we already have vastly less of them than we used to due to the industrial revolution and the wave of automation in the last centuries. Meanwhile a lot of white collar work is melting away or increasingly of the "bullshit job" variety where the added value is dubious. So, a strange side effect of automation is that we've created a lot of bullshit jobs instead of creating mass unemployment.

An even stranger side effect is that a lot of people with college degrees are now doing artisanal stuff instead of committing to a life long of a meaning-less and soul crushing office dwelling existence. So, they're choosing to become blue collar workers. And artisanal here of course means "choosing to do things by hand" instead of maximizing quantity and revenue through industrialized processes. Artisanal is more fun to do and quality of the goods means they are worth more. You can buy bread from a factory, or buy a sour dough bread from a hipster with a college degree. Lack of automation is the whole point there.

What the lockdown last year showed quite convincingly is that a lot of white collar jobs are not really that essential and it doesn't matter that much if productivity there drops by few tens of a percent. The economy suffered a little but mostly that's because of reduced consumption and not of reduced production. And even that is hardly proportional to the productivity loss of masses of people suddenly no longer doing what they were supposed to be doing or doing a lot less of it. A lot of those people never got back to their former level of "productivity" and it continues to not matter economically. Their most important job is spending the money they earn. The labor performed earning that money is secondary.

It's a great argument for basic income: give people money and get them to spend it in order to boost the economy. It's a lot more effective than funneling it to the offshore accounts of the 1 per-centers. They hoard rather than spend their money.

And it frees people up to do something more valuable than stare at a cubicle wall doing something that absolutely and provably does not matter economically. Like bake bread, create art, or do something else that people might spend on.