People who sell their labor but enjoy elevated privileges compared to less prestigious jobs

For example, a code monkey making $120k a year is a labor aristocrat compared to a deliveryman making $50k a year despite both selling their labor and not owning the means of production.

Those that fall under LA are usually more aligned and/or closer with the bourgeoisie. Think of middle managers who hang out with the CFO and CEO or a lawyer who has to interact with politicians and businessmen. I don’t know if this counts, but there are also service workers who resist minimum wage laws because they make more with tips and don’t want to be restricted with everybody else, so their politics are aligned with the companies.

The difference between LA and petite bourgeoisie is that the latter owns the means of production on a smaller scale and frequently also sell their labor.

Is it relevant? I mean, yeah. A lot of working class people don’t want to be shoving boxes or pumping shit out of toilets for a living if the pay and conditions are terrible. They will either aspire or have their kids aspire to do “better”. Once you reach it, you will probably become more out of touch just by the nature of being separated from the ground. Many industries like STEM are notorious for being anti union. And many unions seek to keep their labor aristocracy status and not exactly have solidarity with all labor. Some theorists propose that western LA will resist any attempts from outside the imperial core to improve its conditions because that would inherently mean living standards in the west lowers as exploitation is evened out. We can see this play out in places like France where it seeks to deploy the military in Niger to secure its uranium after the new government became anti-French, and you don’t see many protests against it despite everyone fetishizing the French’s labor protesting.