This is something that's been coming, and we've been posting on, for a while now.
From The Baffler, April 8:
Frothing Mad
How the young became key players in the labor movement
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class by Noam Scheiber. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages. 2026.
For the past half-century, organized labor’s decline has looked less like a political struggle and more an inevitability. Deindustrialization, a new wave of globalization, and a legal regime redesigned to favor employers hollowed out the labor movement so thoroughly that unions came to seem a relic, an institution ill-suited to the modern economy. And yet, in recent years, workplace organizing has surged. Union election petitions filed with the National Labor Relations Board doubled between 2021 and 2024; the restaurant industry, notoriously difficult to organize, jumped to the top of the filings list. New infrastructure emerged to support this activity, from volunteer-run projects like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee to independent unions at Trader Joe’s and REI.
Many of these efforts have been led by young people, which is not an obvious development. Their parents’ generation, facing its own economic shocks, certainly didn’t generate an organizing wave on a similar level. The millennials and zoomers that walked out of Starbucks stores and organized graduate student unions were generally not the children of steelworkers, steeped in labor tradition; a large number had likely never met a union member before becoming one.
In Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, Noam Scheiber identifies a combination of structural and psychological factors that explain younger generations’ transformation into the central players of a resurgent labor movement. Young people have graduated with unprecedented levels of student debt into labor markets hollowed out by the Great Recession and Covid-19, forcing them into low-skilled hospitality and retail jobs. The Starbucks baristas, Apple store workers, video game designers, and screenwriters in Mutiny were taught from an early age that there was no pathway to success that didn’t start with their education. Duped by the fantasy of meritocracy, they fulfilled their end of the bargain—many of the principal characters that Scheiber follows were elite students—but found their liberal arts degrees only good for frothing milk. This quasi-humiliation drove many of them to organize their workplaces.
Scheiber surveys multiple pathways to millennial stagnation, but the two most prominent stories revolve around Starbucks and Apple. This is no coincidence. Scheiber’s argument about disillusionment requires a specific kind of employer, one that needed to attract employees with the je ne sais quoi that the average McDonald’s burger flipper might lack, and they promulgated a progressive vision and company culture to do so. For young college graduates stuck in the service economy, these companies at least offered the sense that even if the job wasn’t what they’d planned, it at least reflected their values and identity.
What Scheiber’s reporting captures is that like so much else in American life, at a vague, undefined point about ten years ago, these jobs got worse. The professed care for each worker’s development was sacrificed at the altar of marginal efficiencies. At Apple, Steve Jobs’s successor, Tim Cook, was a logistics guy. The average customer only bought a new product every couple of years, but services and apps offered a more regular and lucrative source of revenue. So, instead of teaching customers how to use Apple products to make music or a film, creatives found themselves strong-arming them into purchasing AppleCare+. Starbucks’ embrace of ever-more elaborate drink modifiers and mobile ordering transformed the simple act of making coffee into an increasingly stressful production, even as cuts to staffing and the spread of irregular scheduling made it harder for workers to qualify for the health care and tuition benefits that had set the company apart.
This account feels familiar; the idea that well-educated young people have been radicalized by the material and psychological effects of their economic precarity isn’t exactly new. But what makes Mutiny more than just another portrait of generational precarity is that Scheiber captures the process by which Starbucks “partners” and Apple “creative pros” realized they were just workers, no different from a McDonald’s burger flipper....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see:
And that probably accounts for some of the crabbiness we see from folks who, compared with our billions and billions of forebearers, back into the mists of time, are among the most privileged and advantaged ever to walk the earth.
They also get grumpy when reminded of that fact.
And if you aren't already powerful, You are not going to be.
And just as the middle-class and lower middle-class have no place in the coming system, neither will you.
If you allow it to, that realization will destroy you.
2021 - "Do Older People Have a Duty to Die?"
Although these days we use pseudo-psycho-mumbo-jumbo like "Confirming my priors" and "Validating the reader", this old boy was writing about such things in his SciFi novel 76 years ago:“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945
As we saw in yesterday's "Planet of the Grifters" with it's quick look at Turchin's idea that there are too many elites and wannabe elites, there is money to be made from feeding the fantasy of the wannabe. (as the degenerate state of academia shows)
2021 - "Not All Millennials | Generational Wealth and the New Inequality"
2022 - "The Problem with The Mass-Production of Elites, Looking into DoorDash's S-1 Filing"
2023 - "Predicting social decline: End Times by Peter Turchin"
2023 - "Break Up America's Elites"
Although there are some conceptual flaws in Pareto's Circulation of the Elite, overall it is a useful framework upon which to hang the study of the distribution of privileges and influence in a society. This framework can help distinguish between a member of the actual elite who at first glance would be assumed not to be a member, say someone working a temp job in the government's Senior Executive Service, and those who would appear to be a member of the class but are actually just wannabe.*
2025 - "Negative Aura: Gen Z and the Gamification of Outrage"
2025 - "The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates" (is awful)
2025 - Working Class Philosopher On The Overproduction Of Elites
2025 - "The Alienated ‘Knowledge Class’ Could Turn Violent"
Rather than "Knowledge class" they act more like entitled wannabe elites
