In defense of blue-collar creative work

On the necessity of valuing the labour of writing

Every time I return to Hamilton to visit my parents, I drive past the city’s omnipresent steel mills. The towers belch flame and smoke into the sky, making for a dramatic entrance. Of course, it’s not nearly as busy as it was over half a century ago during the rust belt’s heyday.

But the rhythms of steel town work still inform the lives of all Hamiltonians. The roads will be busy during shift change; the kids of steelworkers will stumble into home daycares late at night to be watched sleeping by babysitters while mom and dad work. The smokestacks are always visible out of the corner of your eye, no matter if you’re at a Hamilton Forge game or hiking the Bruce Trail.

I’m a writer. My hands are soft, and yes, I like a $10 latte from time-to-time. And I know proclaiming yourself “writer” doesn’t scream blue collar. But what many people don’t understand is that our payrates put most of us in the creative working class. And despite how easy AI chatbots make creation seem, we in fact have much more in common with our brothers and sisters in trade industries. 

The fetishization of a writing life

I apologize for having to drop some Karl Marx on you so early in this piece, but if we’re to consider writing as blue-collar work adjacent, we need to disabuse preconceived notions of what a writer is. 

A writing life, in the age of TikTok and Instagram, is heavily fetishized. Writers post pictures of their perfect offices. Targeted ads encourage us to buy journals and pens that will “promote productivity.” Mood boards explain how to dress like a writer: are you dark academia or light academia? I’m guilty of lusting after expensive Japanese notebooks or only wanting Pilot pens to write with. But neither of those things are intrinsic to the act of writing. I could scribble short stories in crayon on craft paper. 

Even the writer themselves now must be sold as a product. How many followers do you have? Are you on TikTok? Have you been published? In an attention-driven age, we have commodified what it means to look like a writer to the point where writer cosplay is almost more valued than the actual work of writing itself. 

This is where Marx pops in. In Capital, he explained that in a society “based upon the production of commodities,” objects are the way that social relations manifest themselves. In 2025, you can signal to the world that you are a “writer” through the accumulation of stuff and a polished social media presence. But that’s not what being a working writer is. Writing is sitting down, every day, and vomiting words into a Google Doc, or FinalDraft Pro, or dollar store notebook. And that’s the fun part. Then there’s the grant writing, the planning of the perfect social presence, the idea generation, the editing, on and on and on. It is labour.

But who gets to be a writer? It’s a fair question. The mastheads of prominent magazines and student bodies of great MFA programs are filled with privileged people. (AKA rich and white.) It is an absolute fact that it is easier to make a living full-time as a writer if you come from wealth, and already look like the people who run the writing world. The Canadian Association of Journalists yearly newsroom diversity survey has overwhelmingly found leadership positions dominated by white people. Studies in the United States have found similar results.

But here I believe we are confusing the labour of writing with the opportunity of writing. Or, put another way: we’re talking about class. A small minority of writers will have the opportunity to waltz into great writing jobs, or publish fantastic work, because they belong to the upper class and can already access that world. Lucky them. But a vast majority of writers don’t belong to the upper class, and do not live anything resembling an upper-class lifestyle. In her study of freelancing in the digital age, University of Toronto professor Nicole Cohen found that a majority of writers working in non-fiction were women making poverty wages, or close to, without the support of a partner or family member.

I know from my own experience as a precariously employed writer that much of that writing is not the passion projects we wish we were working on. It’s articles about AI companies for magazines where editors are expecting a certain style, or it’s blog posts for financial institutions who want to attract consumers via search-engine optimized content, or it’s writing newsletters about a prolonged federal election campaign. Not the sexy stuff you imagine when you think about being a writer. And while it can, for some, be a hobby, even the most casual Reylo fan-fiction writers will tell you they put time and effort into their craft.

A life of labour

While writing isn’t manual labour, there is much about it that parallels trade work. 

I didn’t go to journalism school. I learned through what most in my industry would call mentorship, but what I have come to think of as apprenticeship. I banged out movie reviews for the student paper during law school, where senior editors took me under their wing, showing me how to do the job by example.

Many of the skilled trades that make up blue-collar work have formalized apprenticeship training schemes. Carpenters, plumbers and electricians do some in-class work, then follow experienced workers on job sites. The level of their responsibility increases as they learn and gain more confidence in their skills. This has been happening, unofficially, in writing for a long time. 

Masons don’t come out of the womb knowing how to build a wall. They learn how to do it, by doing it over, and over, and over. It’s the same with writers and creatives. In Born Standing Up, Steve Martin recounts how his earliest standup comedy was honed performing at Disneyland. He worked at a magic shop, where he performed tricks for countless guests. Martin’s talent didn’t come out of nowhere; it came out of repetition. 

Sometime last year, while juggling my teaching commitments, my part-time social media management gig, and my MFA deadlines, I saw a job posting for TTC streetcar drivers. Suddenly, I envisioned a life where I had one decent-paying union job. I would just show up for my set hours and work, then go home and use all my creative energy towards the writing I really cared about. 

This was of course, pure fantasy. Could I handle a job where I had to deal with notoriously bad Toronto drivers, food delivery guys zipping by, and an increasingly aggressive public? Hell no. I don’t even have my driver’s license. 

Plus, I already have a job I have to show up for every day: writing. Creating stories takes dedicated time, whether it’s first thing in the morning, or late at night. It can be painful and lonely grappling with words on your own—it’s this work that tech bros and their acolytes want to skip. Those kind of people just want to wrap themselves in the mantle of writer. 

A rising tide should lift all boats

At my very first MFA residency, I sat through a presentation where three recent grads of the program earnestly told us that to become writers, we had to submit our work to be published for free to small journals. These same journals often charge writers fees for the pleasure of eventually rejecting their work! This was part of the game, and we should just be grateful for the “exposure” and opportunity to have our work read.

This is the exact same attitude that was prevalent at most mainstream magazines and digital publishing websites in the US and Canada until the mid-2000s. Internships were almost always unpaid, as were other writing opportunities. Meanwhile, the magazines’ shareholders and publishers made money! (A lot less than in the 1990s, but still.) This free labour was justified by how great the opportunity was to “get to” write, or by the cache of being affiliated with a cool brand, or by the promise of future paid opportunities when you had proven your worth. These excuses clearly devalued the labour of writing—rather than work, it was cast as a fun thing to do, a hobby. It also made for an unequal playing field. Working as an unpaid fact checker, layout person, or blogger, doing hours of work, was only for the privileged few who could afford to work for free. Only through organizing efforts of unions and young workers did various jurisdictions through the United States and Canada enact worker protections for interns and freelancers.

Today, by virtue of the same thought process that devalues writing and artistic expression, a bunch of Silicon Valley bros think they can simplify the creative process to something a computer can do. A very complex, very well-trained computer—but a computer nonetheless. Already, we are witnessing ChatGPT and DeepAI do work that used to be performed by writers and artists. When the work of art is devalued, it becomes easier and easier to lower the financial tide for all of us.

Writers labour in the creation of fiction or non-fiction, poetry or screenwriting. It can be pleasurable to produce, but that does not negate the work put into it. (And any writer will tell you that for all the fun it can be, there are some days the writing process absolutely sucks.) The editors and executives who publish that work are gaining something from it. 

Labour should be compensated—it’s that simple. 

My parents’ neighbours in Hamilton work in an industry that has shrunk, to be sure. But they also know their value. There are fewer and fewer people willing to take the risks that come with steel mill work—the on-the-job accidents, the higher risks of cancer and lung disease, the stressful, high-anxiety work. But the steelworkers organized; they have strong unions that fight for pay that compensates workers fairly. And they know when to snap back at unjust employers who would outsource or undervalue their work.

Writers, of all stripes, need to value their work the same way.