Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, the eighteenth day of Occupy Wall Street. We were in the midst of what would become two months of marches, people’s mics, and informal soup kitchens around the encampment in Zuccotti Park. That autumn day, parts of the lower Manhattan park filled up with tributes to the fallen turtlenecked tech god. I wrote a counter-obit, railing against Apple’s contracting with Foxconn sweatshops in China and the notion of worshiping a CEO in general, especially one who was obsessed with nonstop work — and who was famously a dick. In retrospect, that moment showed the inchoate politics of a disgruntled millennial cohort starting to sort certain things out. A lot of the younger participants in Occupy were college-educated but deep in debt from it; expecting to do work they loved but stuck in unpaid internships; trained for upward mobility but slipping behind their parents. Many shared a widespread attachment to industries like tech, which had preserved a veneer of progressive values and seemed like fun places to make bank. Entrepreneurs and tech titans like Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were still people they might’ve aspired to be.
Today, it’s inconceivable to imagine protesters at, say, an action for Gaza, pausing to mourn a CEO. Over the last decade-plus, the millennial, and then Gen Z, left has been drawn to a roughly democratic-socialist politics (according to recent polls, over half of young adults have a positive view of socialism). For the educated workforce, precarity — just becoming a buzzword around the time of Occupy — changed the point of view of those who thought they would be management and instead found themselves low-paid grunts. The writer Malcolm Harris identified the roots of millennial disillusionment in 2017’s Kids These Days, which showed how children were treated like “human capital” from birth, pushed to develop skills that would serve them in the workplace; homework was just a way of learning to work. This human capital would turn out to be valuable to everyone but the student, who ended up in debt while universities, banks, and employers profited. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s influential From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016) showed why millennials rose up against racial injustice during the Obama era. And journalist Sarah Jaffe diagnosed a related source of disillusionment in her 2021 book Work Won’t Love You Back, a study of a wide range of professions, from child care to digital game design, that employees were meant to “love,” and therefore not mind being exploited in. Jaffe used a feminist analysis to show how much wealth extraction was obscured by fuzzy notions of love, care, and passion.
Girded with such clear-eyed assessments of their economic situation, millennials participated in the Movement for Black lives, the Bernie Sanders campaign, and opposition to Trump and the genocide in Gaza. They were newly alive to how inequality played out in their workplaces and fought bosses who had their employees eating prestige, bringing an end to unpaid internships at places like Condé Nast, unionizing at places like Gawker,Vice, andSalon, and driving a small boom in white-collar unions across nonprofits and academia. They increasingly saw their country and their work as a site of struggle instead of reward.
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, a new book by Noam Scheiber, a New York Times labor reporter focusing on white-collar work, documents this new wave of labor organizing, following young workers at an Apple store, a Starbucks, and an Amazon warehouse, with brief stops at a video game company, a strip club, a university, and a few L.A. writers’ rooms. The workers in this book are mostly millennials, with some Gen Z in the mix, and mostly college graduates. Many of them found themselves working jobs that didn’t make use of their degree or even require one — increasingly common in the post-2008 recession workforce. The job market for recent grads collapsed again with the arrival of Covid, and by 2022, the unemployment rate for such workers “shot past the country’s overall unemployment rate and remained there into Trump’s second term — by far the longest such stretch since the government began keeping data in the 1980s,” Scheiber explains. These grads are still financially better off overall than those without a college degree, but the precarity has been devastating. The blow has also been “a psychological one” for those raised to believe that the development of their human capital would pay off.
By proletarianizing large swathes of white-collar work, capitalists have indeed pushed the downwardly mobile members of the PMC to identify with other workers.
Early in the book we meet Chaya Barrett, born in 1993, who begins working part-time at an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, while still in college and ends up at the store full-time when her BA in communications nets her no job offers. When she started in 2018, Chaya was a fan of the company; when her mom asked her if she really wanted to work at Apple, she replied, “I know everything about all their products.” Apple stores were Steve Jobs’ temples, with imported marble flooring and an unusual sales role called “creative,” in which the company invested heavily. Chaya became a creative, teaching customers whatever they wanted to learn; she specialized in music software. During Covid, creatives found their jobs reduced to mere selling, with classes transformed into thinly veiled advertisements for new products. Worse, the store took down Covid barriers too quickly for employees’ liking, exposing them to customers. When CEO Tim Cook sold $750 million worth of stock in 2021, that “radicalized me,” said Chaya. Apple employees brought in about half a million dollars a year in revenue each, according to Scheiber, but earned less than their counterparts at less sexy stores like AT&T and Verizon Wireless. When a representative of the International Association of Machinists approached two of Chaya’s colleagues, and one of those colleagues approached her, she became as passionate about the union as she had been about iPhones.
Meanwhile, in the Chicago area, theater major Teddy Hoffman returned in 2015 from traveling the world on a prestigious fellowship and wound up working at a Clark and Ridge Starbucks while he sorted out his next steps. When Teddy joined, the coffee chain had a progressive reputation: Jobs came with health care benefits, parental leave, and free online tuition at Arizona State University. A high percentage of staff were queer, because the company had promoted itself as a beacon of acceptance. But service jobs are service jobs, and Teddy wasn’t used to serving. “It’s like when someone has road rage and they’re not seeing the person in the other car,” he told a friend about rude customers. “You have to tolerate how they’re treating you.” During Covid, Teddy saw immuno-compromised coworkers being forced to return to their jobs. Inspired by successful campaigns at two Starbucks in Buffalo, he attended an online DSA event about unionizing Starbucks and got contact info for the Starbucks organizers at Workers United. He became part of a growing phenomenon: strategies for unionization spreading through online training and discussion.
In many cases examined in Mutiny, Covid gives the final jolt to dissatisfied workers. Though Scheiber mentions it only in passing, 2021 marked the beginning of the Great Resignation, which lasted into 2023 as workers quit their jobs in huge numbers, especially in retail, hospitality, and health care. Workers like Teddy and Chaya clearly did not believe their jobs were worth dying for. Even before Covid, conditions for retail workers had begun to slide. Starbucks’ benefits had become less generous, and Apple’s management was questioning its lavish investment in its stores. Scheiber doesn’t exactly put these clawbacks in context — we’re told that Starbucks’ benefits are good, not how they compare to those of other jobs — but it’s clear that a lot of the ire emerges not from total immiseration but from humiliation. The shift from creative and engaging work to fast-paced scutwork is damaging to these workers’ sense of self. They were taught confidence from birth that they could run things, that they were meant to be managers. They enjoy what labor sociologist Ruth Milkman has called “class confidence.” Their instincts led them to a classic labor movement insight: the workers could run this place better than the bosses.
Mutiny shows these workers learning other fundamentals of labor organizing: They struggle against workplace harassment and anti-union campaigns; they start by asking for voluntary recognition and respect for their hard work; they quickly find that without strikes, shutdowns, and walkouts that stop business, large corporations are not inclined to come to the table. Salting, the practice of taking a job in order to organize a workplace, plays a major role: Salts were responsible for much of the initial organizing at Starbucks in Buffalo and in other struggles, like the unionization of Amazon’s Long Island warehouse, JFK8. Tactics that had been shed by some of America’s large, bureaucratic labor unions — the strike in particular — have been revived in part by dissatisfied millennials beholden to no centralized union strategy. The United Auto Workers (UAW) was revitalized by an influx of grad students who threw their support behind a reform caucus that had previously struggled to defeat the union’s corrupt and complacent leadership, who had a tacit no-strike deal with the Big Three auto companies. When the grad students met the UAW reformers, veterans of union democratization struggles, “they were like a group of biblical scholars who one day wake up to find themselves in the middle of Exodus.” That union, under the leadership of Shawn Fain, did an organizing U-turn, striking repeatedly in 2023 to force American auto companies into major wage increases and new guarantees around the manufacturing of electric vehicles.
Identities and political stances that transcend work suffuse these narratives. In 2023, the New York Times “reported that managers at dozens of Starbucks stores across more than twenty states had forbidden employees from putting up flags and other Pride decorations, or ordered workers to take them down.” According to a Starbucks official, the company got strict about posting things in stores “after the union campaign gained traction, worried that laxness would lead to a proliferation of union paraphernalia.” But the ban backfired — people in the lefty Chicago neighborhood where Teddy’s Starbucks was situated were glad to support the workers’ strike during pride. Something similar happened in October 2023, when the Starbucks Workers United account tweeted (then quickly deleted) “Solidarity with Palestine!” over a picture of a bulldozer breaking down the fence at Israel’s border with Gaza. Starbucks sued the union, claiming that its use of the Starbucks name confused customers and put employees at risk, but, as Scheiber reports, “instead of further isolating and undermining the union, the Gaza episode became a wind at its back.” Customers started showing up in support of the workers, and tipping heavily.
Not every story is one of happy collaboration across race and gender lines: Within the Amazon Labor Union, which formed after the extraordinary 2022 campaign at JFK8, there was a publicized fallout between Chris Smalls — Black, a college dropout, and the very famous face of the union — and Connor Spence, a white guy “who had worked at an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey while putting himself through community college and daydreaming about unionizing the place.” The arguments were about tactics and the new union’s constitution, but they also clashed around identity, with Spence accusing Smalls of creating a personality cult and Smalls accusing Spence of being a privileged white person who could go home to “Mommy and Daddy.”
By 2025, when Mutiny ends, the Starbucks and Apple unions had forced the companies to negotiate, but success remained elusive. Both companies took some union demands and applied them across their stores — to reduce the incentives of other stores to unionize. Some of those new benefits were denied, at least temporarily, to unionized locations. Starbucks workers have not won a national contract as of the book’s writing; the Towson Apple store achieved one a year and a half after unionizing. At the Amazon warehouse, there is no contract, and the union’s fervor hasn’t spread to other facilities. All this makes the closing notes of the book a little jarring. “If the radicalization of the college-educated continues, it’s not hard to imagine it upending American politics,” writes Scheiber, before noting that alliances between the college-educated and working-class and poor people “have brought political upheaval throughout history,” mentioning the 1970s toppling of the Shah in Iran, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the mid-1850s Taiping Rebellion in China. These far-flung and lofty examples only underscore that the fruits of U.S. millennials’ radicalization have yet to be enjoyed. We haven’t exactly toppled the czar.
Far larger than the number of Starbucks workers in this country (around 200,000) is the number of teachers with a college degree (nearly 4 million) and nurses with a college degree (the majority of America’s 4.7 million nurses). Nurses and public school teachers also have some of the most militant unions in the country — the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike gave the labor movement a new lease on life, and the #RedForEd illegal teacher strikewave in red states made 2018 the biggest year for strikes since 1986. But Scheiber barely mentions either sector. Teachers figure only briefly as a prelude to his story that “few college grads were as affronted as the ones who worked in restaurants and retail — the heart of the college-educated working class.”
Teachers were, in fact, pretty affronted, and probably have a stronger claim from a scale and longevity perspective to being the heart of the college-educated working class. From Chicago to West Virginia and Oklahoma to Los Angeles, teachers spoke not just about wages, but about the denigration of their profession, and the plight of their underserved students. Teachers and nurses sit in an interesting place between more lucrative white-collar work in the corporate world, and blue-collar jobs like construction. Their jobs have been called pink-collar, reflecting that they are mostly held by women and therefore never fully accepted as skilled white-collar work (and suggestive of their exclusion from the narrative in this book). Their campaigns often reflect the tension between caring for their communities and making a decent living; teachers have been successful in tying their own working conditions to students’ learning conditions, and the aspirations of students’ families. Many of the strategies around community involvement in the union campaigns that Scheiber describes were most recently developed (though not invented) by these overwhelmingly female unions. During the #RedForEd strike, many of the strike leaders were college-educated millennials.
The fruits of U.S. millennials’ radicalization have yet to be enjoyed.
Why does Scheiber draw a line around restaurants, retail, and creative work? These workers do have certain qualitatively different experiences, having expected to occupy a job with more money and prestige at the cutting edge of capitalism. Scheiber is examining the condition of a relatively narrow band of the professional-managerial class (the notorious PMC). The fate of these particular young people represents a queasy question for the average New York Times reader: If PMC parents devote themselves to their children’s education, will it still launch their upward mobility? This swathe of workers seems to be rapidly joining the ranks of already devalued PMC workers who have long been unionized (in part because they have not enjoyed the social prestige and huge salaries of, say, tech workers). To tell this PMC story as separate from, instead of contiguous with, the labor strikes of the last 15 years makes them seem more like leaders of the labor movement than they are. And it keeps us from seeing clearly the abundant similarities between these college-educated restaurant and retail workers and the deskilling and devaluing of educated work in more traditionally working-class jobs.
A different way to describe Scheiber’s focus is that he seems most interested not in a certain class, but in a certain organizing mode: decentralized organizing mostly happening outside of traditional unions, or what some have recently called worker-to-worker organizing. Mutiny is in large part about this newish strategy that it never names or assesses. And assessing it should be core to any argument that claims a powerful political role for downwardly mobile millennials in food service and retail jobs. Since the 1990s, the labor movement has been dependent on an organizing model that involves a high staff-to-worker ratio, and the careful targeting of winnable fights. In the worker-to-worker model, people take on questions of strategy and tactics and start organizing conversations in their own workplace without the day-to-day involvement and money of a larger union and its professional organizers — although as we see in Scheiber’s book, these are often advising from the sidelines.
Much has been written about this approach in progressive labor publications like Labor Notes and in books like sociologist and organizer Eric Blanc’s We Are the Union and Jaz Brisack’s Get on the Job and Organize (Brisack salted and organized that first Buffalo Starbucks). Blanc and Brisack have argued that worker-to-worker organizing must be the cornerstone of a renewed labor movement. The staff organizer model is extremely expensive and unions can be hesitant to experiment with new tactics and terrain — Starbucks, for example, was never an appealing target for established unions, who thought that a workforce spread across thousands of shops was too difficult to organize. Blanc talks about “seeding” the labor movement by spreading ideas on social media, and training any worker who wants to organize through efforts like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a project of the United Electrical Workers and DSA; and Workers Organizing Workers (WOW), a DSA project to train salts. Blanc more than Brisack emphasizes the importance of feeding these efforts with money and strategic guidance from traditional unions. He notes the ways in which adding new, self-organized workers to unions can spur reform movements in a positive cycle of movement invigoration, as we can see in the UAW. Many advocates of worker-to-worker organizing maintain that worker-led efforts maximize creativity and radicalism. (Union leadership was appalled by Starbucks’ workers’ pro-Palestine stance, for example, but that stance brought people to the union’s side.)
Critics of the worker-to-worker strategy point out that many of these efforts, like at Starbucks, have not resulted in actual contracts. They also argue that targeting can be a good thing — the labor movement overall might have more political leverage by controlling the auto industry than the nation’s coffee shops. A further concern is one of scale: Over 600 Starbucks have unionized, but this represents about 5 percent of the total stores in the U.S. or about 14,000 workers, and many worker-to-worker efforts that have won contracts have been at small chains.
One assumes that Scheiber is aware of these debates. But he sticks to the human interest stories, in classic Timesian descriptive mode — and he does tell them well. It would be helpful for a reporter with his resources and sourcing to situate the labor struggles he covers in a larger context. One of his most powerful success stories is that of the graduate students absorbed into the UAW: Does their example suggest anything about the tactic of joining large unions versus continuing to independently organize? Scheiber doesn’t say. It’s worth noting too that many of the workers who voted to unionize Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse were not college-educated, although the salts were. Is the presence of people with a college education a major explanatory factor in recent labor revolts? Is the college-educated downwardly mobile millennial reinvigorating the labor movement, or offering a rearguard defense of their own dignity? Mutiny doesn’t really ask these questions, but its examples do shine some light on the values that are driving the labor movement today.
In 1976, Barbara Ehrenreich and her then-husband John Ehrenreich famously described the PMC as a class with a set of skills and even ethics that could cut two ways: Their special status could either produce elitism and contempt for blue-collar workers, or a useful ethos of service and fairness could lead them to unite with fellow workers against the capitalist class. In a 2012 reconsideration of their work, Barbara and John Ehrenreich discussed the ways in which the PMC has since collapsed as a class with significant power and confidence in itself. For one thing, it’s been split between wildly successful members who serve capital more directly than ever before — in massive corporate law firms, as quants in finance — and those who have become disposable: teachers, nurses, social workers, and now journalists, medical researchers, and professors. They wrote:
The debt-ridden unemployed and underemployed college graduates, the revenue-starved teachers, the overworked and underpaid service professionals, even the occasional whistle-blowing scientist or engineer—all face the same kind of situation that confronted skilled craft-workers in the early 20th century and all American industrial workers in the late 20th century. In the coming years, we expect to see the remnants of the PMC increasingly making common cause with the remnants of the traditional working class for, at a minimum, representation in the political process. This is the project that the Occupy movement initiated and spread, for a time anyway, worldwide.
By proletarianizing large swathes of white-collar work, capitalists have indeed pushed the downwardly mobile members of the PMC to identify with other workers. Kevin, one of the Apple workers, tells Scheiber, “They want people to think it’s in fact a true meritocracy when on every level they’re manipulating it.” Chaya, by the end of the book, derides “Black capitalists” and “Girl Bosses,” shedding her identity as an aspiring manager. “Since at least the Reagan era,” Scheiber writes, “the college-educated had seen themselves as management-adjacent — as future executives and aspiring professionals being groomed for a life of affluence. They did not believe they had much in common with the working class. Nearly half did not approve of unions.” By the early 2020s, nearly 70 percent supported unions.
Is the college-educated downwardly mobile millennial reinvigorating the labor movement, or offering a rearguard defense of their own dignity?
Teddy with his drama training and Chaya with her comms degree are excellent advocates. PMC values have been hegemonic in American culture for the last half century, so, to most journalists, PMC representatives speak the language of common sense: fairness, meritocracy, respect at work. Within this framework, they have made so-called identity demands (for diversity and reproductive and gender-affirming health care) commonsense additions to workplace struggles. Coverage of the labor movement increased as journalists themselves began to unionize, turning their skills toward elevating labor writ large. Scheiber himself is a member of the NewsGuild of New York, and many of the journalists covering Starbucks and Apple had, by the 2020s, fought for their own unions.
In response to these media-friendly PMC activists, the capitalists have recruited PMC spokespeople of their own. Chief anti-wokester Bari Weiss, for instance, thrives by speaking in the idiom of the PMC (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices thwart meritocracy!), but in service to capital — her values so wholly aligned with those of figures like Starbucks founder Howard Schultz and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen that they gave her startup capital to build a Substack. Weiss, now editor in chief of CBS News, tells CEOs that they’re right to be annoyed by the cries of their diversity-demanding, union-threatening underlings, that these people are in fact lazy, self-righteous, and dumb, and that the capitalists are not racist, sexist, and exploitive. Capitalists aren’t nimble enough to do this rhetorical work themselves — Schultz’s comically tin-eared denigration of his workers’ union campaigns, and his presidential run showed that — and need PMC assistance generating ideology as much as they need their help with tax strategy.
The anti-PMC PMCers love to harp on identity politics: Weiss, for example, cut her teeth writing about how #MeToo has gone too far and the problems with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. (She seems to have gotten interested in economic questions like inflation around the time her corporate speaking gigs exploded.) Even in some corners of the left, there has long been the assumption that young PMC progressives with their fluid genders and snowflake sensitivity hold social views that separate them from the rest of the working class. This has certainly been true at times. (Barbara Ehrenreich has told a cringe-inducing story about some friends of hers, laid-off foundry workers who had traveled to a socialist meeting only to be denounced by an adjunct professor who said she was “tired of listening to white men talk.”) But the stories in Mutiny suggest that identity markers of queerness, for example, and political positions that extend beyond labor, like support for Gaza, can be part of the glue that holds a union together.
Scheiber notes that, “on some of the social and cultural issues that once defined the chasm between the college-educated and the working class, the two groups largely converged during the Biden era.” People with and without college degrees have similar levels of support for immigration, for example. According to Pew Research, 64 percent of those with a college degree support abortion, compared to 56 percent without one, just an eight point spread. In a 2025 article for Jacobin, Chris Maisano argued that “candidates can win [workers without a college degree] over even if they don’t necessarily agree with progressive social policy positions, so long as those candidates also speak effectively to working-class economic needs and interests. At the same time, the voters for whom social policy issues are more salient, namely voters with college degrees, want Democratic candidates to stake out clearly progressive positions on these questions and to campaign on them.” Maisano’s article was written before Zohran Mamdani’s election, but you couldn’t find a better description of the campaign that he ran.
Mounting evidence of alignment like this should weigh heavily against some of the left-right coalition politics being practiced at places like the Center for Working Class Politics, which tends to produce class-reductionist policy papers from the left, or the supposedly left-right hybrid magazine Compact, which practices a sort of paleoconservative and ethnonationalist politics of redistribution based on the traditional family. (It should also weigh against arguments to toss out workplace diversity demands with their corporate bathwater; Scheiber published an article in 2025 called “As Trump Attacks D.E.I., Some on the Left Approve,” quoting Nation president Bhaskar Sunkara saying that he hopes DEI “doesn’t come back.”) The majority of recent college graduates — and thus a significant segment of the downwardly mobile PMC — are women. Women, queer folks, and people of color have been among the leaders of every successful labor push in Scheiber’s book, and they’re not likely to be satisfied with a politics that puts their health care or autonomy on the back burner.
In Blanc’s work on labor organizing, he has often cited social atomization as a major obstacle. Most people don’t live close to their colleagues in tight-knit neighborhoods like workers might have done in the 1930s or even the 1960s. Turnover is high. Much of life is lived online. So-called identity issues emerge throughout Scheiber’s narrative as constitutive of social bonds that are crucial in the unions’ development; socialist projects like DSA and the Bernie campaign offered mechanisms for those people to mobilize.
Asked about the downwardly mobile PMC and the traditional working class in an interview, Barbara Ehrenreich said that we will have to put “together a new kind of class out of some of the parts of the old one. We don’t want to turn class into just another dimension of identity, since class is always aspirational in the sense of trying to connect people who haven’t been connected before… we’re trying to reach beyond these limits.” Our perennial question is how class struggle might knit together thousands of unlike parts, and evidence suggests that as layers of the PMC detach from capital and fall down the economic ladder, they’ll have plenty in common with each other.
Sarah Leonard is the editor in chief of Lux.
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