This is something I see a lot. When people say "my plumber makes $200k/year" what they mean is the guy who owns a plumbing business they use makes that much money. Very few blue collar workers that aren't also small business owners make over $100k/year and it can be pretty hard to get the gigs that do (usually require having many years of experience and being in the union in a particular area like NYC, or having a very rare specialty). The only "easy" way to break $100k/year as a blue collar worker is to work lots of overtime, which isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison with white collar jobs