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The making of the millennial working class

The Making of the Millennial Working Class

A new book follows a new generation of labor organizers as they attempt to unionize their workplaces.

A Starbucks strike in New York City, 2025.

For more than a generation, this country has told young people the same thing: Go to college. A college degree wouldn’t guarantee wealth, but it would provide ballast and keep you out of the most precarious segments of the labor market. If factories closed and clerical work was automated, a college degree would serve as insurance. The alternative was to risk falling into a widening service economy defined by unstable hours, flat wages, and a shrinking sense of control.

Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

After the Great Recession, this advice became a recurring theme in political speeches and policy debates. In his 2009 State of the Union address, Barack Obama implored Americans to commit themselves to “one year or more of higher education or career training.” “Every American,” he decreed, “will need to get more than a high-school diploma.” Obama offered this guidance as a matter of realism but also as a type of social contract: If you go to college, then we will find you a job.

But who paid for young people’s college education? As public funding for state universities continued to erode and tuition at private universities skyrocketed, the bill fell more and more on students and their families. By 2023, the country’s total outstanding student-loan debt surpassed $1.7 trillion. The labor market, meanwhile, did not produce a matching supply of stable, degree-indexed jobs to justify this debt. A 2024 report found that one year after graduation, more than half of recent four-year college graduates were working in jobs that didn’t require a degree, and nearly half still lacked a degree-level job a decade later. The social contract wasn’t working: Going to college did not ensure anything other than monthly loan payments and unstable and often low-paying work.

Noam Scheiber’s new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, takes place against this backdrop. Scheiber, a labor reporter for The New York Times, follows the organizing campaigns—often led by college-educated workers—at Starbucks, Apple retail stores, Hollywood writers’ rooms, universities, video-game companies, and Amazon warehouses. These sectors differ in prestige and pay scales, but the job design often doesn’t. Tasks are modularized. Performance is monitored through dashboards and software. Chances for advancement thin out. Authority consolidates upward. Contracts shorten or schedules fluctuate from week to week.

In these workplaces, workers acquire what the sociologist Ruth Milkman calls “class confidence”: that moment when workers stop seeing their woes as the result of personal miscalculation and begin to understand them as structural. A college degree was supposed to be the path to advancement. Increasingly, collective action feels like the safer bet.

Scheiber approaches these fights as labor disputes, not as the generational melodramas they’re often reduced to in airy commentary. He lays out the material reasons for the new wave of labor organizing—those changes in pay scales, scheduling systems, contract language, and management tactics—and focuses on how workplace organization itself produces organizing.

TV writer Sydney Mitchel’s journey from an NYU Tisch undergraduate carrying substantial debt to a job in the television industry captures the volatility of migrating into work that still advertises itself as “professional.” For a brief stretch, Mitchel’s career looked like the story that aspiring screenwriters are often still told: Get into a TV series’ writers’ room and start moving up the ladder. Mitchel became a staff writer and then a story editor for the NCIS franchise, paid on a union-negotiated scale. For a moment, her career path looked promising: steady employment on a durable television franchise, incremental advancement, and a middle-class life in Los Angeles.

That stability disappeared in February 2021. While the show’s writers raced toward a season finale, the showrunners announced a new series, NCIS: Hawai’i,and dissolved the existing writers’ room with about a week’s notice. Mitchel and her coworkers called one another trying to understand what had just happened. The ladder she was climbing turned out to be modular: The franchise continued, but the personnel rotated.

Hollywood has always been precarious, but streaming has upended the structure for everyone—from those yet to break into the industry to those at the top. It has shortened seasons and created “mini-rooms”—brief, preproduction writers’ rooms which map out a season and then disband—that compress writing timelines. Studios now often separate writing from production. Residuals no longer function as the reliable floor they once were for mid-level writers. Mitchel went more than a year without writing work. To make ends meet, she took a job as a personal assistant for a wealthy family in Los Angeles. The work was logistical and steady. It was........

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