Patsocs tend to want to focus on productive labor and suggest working with students, lumpen proletarians and the average service worker is inefficient. I’ve heard the defense of this that blue-collar workers, truckers, etc are the ones who actually have the power to shut stuff down, and are therefore the most powerful for revolution and so on. Is that a valid line of argument? Is it a good strategy to focus on organizing those workers?
The question the OP asked, is if its worth it to organize blue-collar workers. An examination of what a “blue-collar” worker is(in the imperial core), their relation to production, and their revolutionary potential, is absolutely relevant to the discussion.
We don’t do things just because “we have nothing better to do”. People’s time is limited, and there’s no use wasting it on dead ends. You could apply the same argument to voting for the US democratic party.
There’s even some anti-colonialist thinkers, that believe that any imperial-core organizing, especially for wage increases, or more social services, is harmful, since the surplus value that funds it comes off the backs of global south proles. IE, it has nothing to do with class struggle, but simply a “re-allocation” or “renegotiation” between imperial core capitalists and their labor aristocracy, of the surplus already extracted from the global south.