Gold-collar worker (GCW) is a neologism which has been used to describe either young, low-wage workers who invest in conspicuous luxury, or highly-skilled knowledge workers, traditionally classified as white collar, but who have recently become essential enough to business operations as to warrant a new classification.

These are 18 to 25 year-old persons in a position to divert a significant portion of their earnings towards material luxuries. They typically have fewer than 2 years of post-high school education. Like their counterparts attending college, they are often employed as retail workers or in the hospitality industry, particularly food service as servers. This group tends to have more disposable income than college students, who often pay high tuition costs, take on a number of financial loans, and often move away from their parents. A lack of financial obligations leaves young people in this situation with a higher enough level of discretionary/disposable income, which they use to finance luxury goods. Thus, the term also carries a connotation of immaturity, the extension of youth, and nurtured adolescence, as in the movie Failure to Launch, where a man still lives with his parents despite being well into his 30s and owning a business. In the UK the expression 'two-bob billionaire' is used, in that whilst one feels wealthy and hardworking one's status is in fact illusory.

Shiho Fukada (深田 志穂, Fukada Shiho^?) is a Japanese photojournalist currently working out of Beijing, China. Her clientele consists of The New York Times, MSNBC, Le Monde, the Chicago Tribune and the New York magazine, among others. She won the Grand Prize in Editor and Publisher Magazine’s Ninth Annual Photos of the Year contest in 2008. Fukada also won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 2010 to research and photograph Japan's disposable workers.

Fukada majored in English literature and first worked in fashion advertising as an account executive. She borrowed a 35 mm SLR camera and started making photos.

Rachel Anne Maddow (pronounced /ˈmædoʊ/; born April 1, 1973) is an American television host, political commentator, and author. Maddow hosts a nightly television show, The Rachel Maddow Show, on MSNBC. Her syndicated talk radio program of the same name aired on Air America Radio. Maddow is the first openly gay anchor of a prime-time news program in the United States.

Asked about her political views by the Valley Advocate, Maddow replied, "I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform."

Maddow was born in Castro Valley, California. Her father, Robert B. "Bob" Maddow, is a former United States Air Force captain who resigned his commission the year before her birth and found civilian work as a lawyer for the East Bay Municipal Utility District. Her mother, Elaine Maddow (née Gosse), is a school program administrator from Newfoundland, Canada. She has one older brother, David. Her father is of Russian and Dutch descent and her mother is of English and Irish ancestry. Maddow's mother was raised a strict Roman Catholic, and Maddow herself grew up in a community that her mother has described as "very conservative." Maddow was a competitive athlete and played three sports in high school. Referencing John Hughes films, she describes herself in high school as "a cross between the jock and the antisocial girl."

Robert Bernard Reich ( /ˈraɪʃ/; born June 24, 1946) is an American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997.

Reich is currently Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was formerly a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. He has also been a contributing editor of The New Republic, The American Prospect (also chairman and founding editor), Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Reich is a political commentator on programs including Hardball with Chris Matthews, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNBC's Kudlow & Company, and APM's Marketplace. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century, and The Wall Street Journal in 2008 placed him sixth on its list of the "Most Influential Business Thinkers". He was appointed a member of President-elect Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.