In 2017, 2019 and 2021, the House introduced — but didn’t pass — versions of the New Collar Jobs Act, which aimed to promote jobs and training in fields like cybersecurity.

“It’s great there are alternative models to four-year college,” said Christopher M. Cox, a researcher who has written on the new collar economy. But he added that “new collar” might also be a clever term to downplay workers’ anxieties, by framing the changing labor market as more utopia, less “The Terminator.”