These words refer to those who earn their living by physical effort, or by the practice of relatively simply skills. Labourer and worker are the most factual of these, with the least emotional tinge of one sort or another. Labourer specifically emphasizes physical effort while worker in more general in applying to a wider range of tasks and reaching higher up the ladder of skills.

• Automation hits hardest at the completely unskilled labourer , next at the skilled tradesman, and last at the white-collar worker .

By contrast with worker , however, working man and workman have a narrower or more specific range of application, working man particularly being applicable at most to semi-skilled labour: the limited saving power of the average working man . Workman , when it is not an abbreviated form of working man , can suggest the possession of skills approaching that of the craftsman: workmen who restored and refinished her parquet floors.

Job holder and wage earner are both ways of stressing the money a labourer or worker earns and the fact that he is, at the moment of description, actually employed, that is, holding a job or earning wages. Of the two, job holder can apply more generally, since it stresses being in a position of employment more than the position itself, which could range from unskilled to skilled work. Wage earner distinguishes between someone who gets a pay enveloped and someone who is self-employed.

Proletarian originally denoted a member of the lowest class of the state in ancient Rome, who owned no property. The term got a new lease on life from modern political and economic theorists, particularly Karl Marx, who used it to designate that class of a state or of the world which, lacking personal means of production, is forced to sell its labour for wages in order to live.