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

Description:

The story of a disillusioned generation that set out to reclaim its dignity and take on corporate America.

In recent years, young college grads have faced an alarming reality: crushing debt, unemployment, and jobs below their qualifications. They are frustrated that the time and money they invested in a degree have failed to bring about the opportunities they were promised.

The anger of this college-educated working class began to boil over during the Covid pandemic, when workers at companies like Apple and Starbucks shocked corporate America by voting to unionize. Not long after, the veteran New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber met Chaya Barrett, an astute college grad and eight-year Apple employee who had stepped up and helped organize her coworkers at an Apple store near Baltimore.

While following Barrett and her cohort as their seemingly spontaneous rebellions spread far and wide--from college-educated workers at Apple stores and Starbucks cafés, through video-game studios, and even to Hollywood writers' rooms--Scheiber realized he was witnessing something deep and lasting. Mutiny is the revelatory account of a generation made confident by their historic educational achievements, only to become disillusioned when their degrees yielded far less than they were taught to expect.

With striking empathy, Scheiber paints a vivid portrait of this new working class while telling the dramatic story of its revolt against the status quo. He describes how recent developments like the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the war in Gaza have further fueled its discontent, and he explains why the college-educated working class will continue to demand change in the workplace, in cities like New York, and in national politics for years to come.

Review Quotes:

"One of the most thought-provoking books I've read in the past year . . . Scheiber presents a series of incisively reported profiles of young people who did everything they were asked to do but still found themselves working at a Starbucks or in an Amazon warehouse. Their discontent, Scheiber concludes, isn't explicitly economic or cultural or political but, rather, is what happens when people with degrees realize that what they thought was a temporary postgraduate job will almost certainly become their career. " --Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker

"In reporting on the college-educated working class, Scheiber . . . is like a zoologist whose fieldwork has revealed the existence of an animal that contradicts some long-standing theory of speciation."
--George Packer, The Atlantic

"[Scheiber's] extensive reporting about recent college grads toiling away at Starbucks and the Apple Store shows what happens when structural forces squeeze members of the educated class: They become radicalized." --Ryu Spaeth, New York magazine

"In April 1917, Vladimir Lenin arrived by train in Russia, at Petrograd's Finland Station. Hence the title of Edmund Wilson's 1940 history of socialist thought: "To the Finland Station." Noam Scheiber's chronicle of young college graduates aspiring to overthrow sadness and capitalism should have been titled To Buffalo's Elmwood Avenue Starbucks." --George Will, The Washington Post

"[A] brilliant book for anyone who's actually interested in understanding young leftists." --The Free Press

"If you're wondering why so many young people lean toward socialism, this revealing book is for you." --Kirkus Reviews

"Insightful . . . A galvanizing look at a stymied white-collar generation with the 'politics . . . of the proletariat.'"
--Publishers Weekly

"[Scheiber's] book is revelatory." --Bethany McLean, author of The Big Fail

"Scheiber's deeply revealing and vibrant account of the revolt of college-educated workers is a genuine must-read in both boardrooms and union halls. Mutiny is an uncanny glimpse of our economic future and a powerful reminder that upheaval rises less often from the bottom of society than it does from the roiling, frustrated middle."
--Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning author of Wildland and The Haves and Have-Yachts

"An important book that gives an authoritative, up-close, fully humanized, and altogether indispensable depiction of the new American economy and our political near future. Noam Scheiber is as lucid a writer as he is rigorous a reporter--a rarity--and Mutiny is surprisingly hopeful."
--Kurt Andersen, New York Times bestselling author of Evil Geniuses

"Mutiny is a must-read. It explores so many of the problems that have been puzzling all of us for the past decade: What happens when you can't get a job out of college? What is the relationship between a corporation and an employee? And what can people do about it? The book is a deeply reported account of the current battle between class, corporate power, and personhood."
--Kyla Scanlon, author of In This Economy?

"With telling details and insightful analysis, the gifted journalist Noam Scheiber explains why many college-educated workers--baristas and grad students, Apple salesclerks and TV writers--now see unions as the way to transform their precarious jobs. Anyone who wants to understand the rise of a new kind of labor movement should read this book."
--Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win

"In a riveting chronicle of America's white-collar revolt, Noam Scheiber shows that the would-be winners of America's meritocracy have become its rebels. A new working class has emerged among the college-educated population and has come to realize that their degrees no longer guarantee economic stability, or even dignity at work. Educated, underpaid, and disillusioned, their revolt has the potential to change our politics and our economy."
--Derek Thompson, coauthor of Abundance and author of On Work