Matt Lucky reviews Noam Schieber’s Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, now out at Macmillan.
Noam Schieber’s Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class recounts how a generation of millennial college graduates reenergized the United States labor movement upon discovering that the college educations into which they’d invested hundreds of thousands of dollars no longer assured them promised well-paying jobs and secure livelihoods. After the 2008 Great Recession, the U.S. experienced a surge in college-educated workers in occupations that did not require that level of education—what is generally called underemployment. A 2024 study from the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Institute for the Future of Work reported that 45% of workers who graduated from college ten years ago remain underemployed.
These young Americans, Schieber recounts, “left college with certain career ambitions, only to find themselves laboring in a different kind of job for longer than expected.” They had expected to be in management-adjacent roles on the path to affluence, yet they found themselves trapped in low-paying service jobs. These disappointed expectations, Schieber relates, amounted to more than a loss of income. This inflicted a psychological injury on the graduates who thought they had done everything right, investing in their human capital, only to see their lives derailed.
Schieber links the disappointed expectations of underemployed college graduates to the contemporary surge in interest in socialism as “young, downwardly mobile college grads appeared to be embracing more radical politics as they felt put-upon at work or marginalized in the job market.” Such discontented college-educated radicals are potentially extra disruptive to the system as they “tend to know their legal rights. They feel empowered to change their personal circumstances, even to influence current events.” That is, these workers are more likely to stand up for themselves compared to the employees businesses are accustomed to. Hence, we have a recipe for tumults.
Schieber claims the source of the troubles was that “the economy was producing more and more college graduates, but not as many of the good-paying jobs they had traditionally held.” Mutiny is a narrative about the overproduction of elites relative to the needs of the economy. Repeatedly, Schierber laments how colleges admit and graduate far more students with degrees that equip them for occupations that simply do not have a comparable demand for labor. The flip side, of which Schieber is more approving, is that large student debt burdens and declining job prospects have led graduates to awaken the U.S. labor movement from its quiescence.
College grads find enshittified jobs
Schieber’s narrative interweaves the personal stories of Teddy, Chaya, and Sydney as they struggle to assert their rights as workers against Starbucks, Apple, and Hollywood, respectively. Along the way, we also encounter supporting stories from labor organizing around Amazon, the auto industry, graduate students, and videogame testers. Ultimately, Schieber delivers something that reads like a novel with shifting points of view. It’s a compelling read, yet the manner of approach leaves some themes underdeveloped.
One such theme of note is the enshittification of employment. At the beginning of their stories, Chaya and Sydney have decent jobs. Teddy’s position at Starbucks is less personally desirable, yet even his role experiences deterioration as, for instance, Starbucks fails to protect employees during Covid.
At Apple, Chaya started as a “creative,” denoting someone who provided one-on-one tutorials for enthusiastic customers. It was one of the most desirable positions in Apple stores, as it functioned like a teaching role, rather than a sales position, and allowed creatives to specialize in offering courses that aligned with their passions. For example, creatives might teach courses in “coding, app design, photography, or filmmaking.”
Alas, over the course of Mutiny, we see Apple repeatedly degrade the job into something ever closer to a salesperson, as Apple put the squeeze on their employees. Tim Cook’s tenure as CEO transformed the company’s retail operations away from Steve Jobs’s vision of white-glove boutiques designed to win the loyalty of Apple enthusiasts and into more conventional stores centered on optimizing for efficiency and profits. As Schieber relates, “the creative job was supposed to mean that Apple valued her expertise—that she had achieved an exalted station within the company. It had taken her almost three years to get there. To have effectively become a salesperson again felt like a slap in the face.”
Sydney experiences a similar trajectory in the film industry. Here, studios have taken advantage of the technological shift to streaming services to establish new, more extractive employment relations with writers. Historically, studios retained writers for most of the production process so that they could be involved in every step from script-writing to filming and edits to ensure quality. Many studios have now adopted the mini-room model that retains writers only for the period to produce the scripts (3-6 months). Employment is now more precarious, pays less, and excludes writers from production roles, which denies them residuals. On this, Schieber writes that, “the mini-room effectively shifted financial risk away from the employer and onto the worker—in some respects what companies like Starbucks did when they guaranteed employees fewer hours and subjected them to more volatile schedules.” In his assessment, the enshittification of each of these jobs reflected an economy-wide trend of corporate leaders degrading working conditions to extract ever more value from workers for less.
College grads find labor
The consequence of enshittifying jobs was to push workers toward labor. Schieber details how labor’s eventual mutiny against corporate elites took them by surprise. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan had taught corporate leaders that the public could be persuaded to side with management against workers, and in the following decades, the U.S. experienced a collapse in labor strikes. However, after four decades of capitalism failing to deliver the goods to Americans, Schieber contends the balance of power and public opinion has decisively shifted back in favor of labor. The corporate executives in Mutiny overplayed their hands because they had not realized how odious their conduct had become in the public’s mind.
There are two points worth raising here on the enshittification theme, one minor and one major. On the minor point, Schieber is overstating the extent to which Americans have come to identify as part of the labor movement in conflict with the managerial class. There are many other factors dividing American identities, and class identities have numerous cultural components separate from a shared experience as workers under the thumb of corporations. Even those Americans who sympathize with labor may also identify with religious or political allegiances that submerge their ties to labor or even countervail them. To wit, I’m not sure how much pure class consciousness is at work here.
The major point is that the enshittification of work that Schieber documents in Mutiny is the more plausible explanation for the surge in an assertive labor movement than the role of downwardly mobile college graduates upon whom he centers the narrative. That is, I am not convinced that more underemployed college-educated workers were the main causal factor here as opposed to workplaces simply becoming miserable alongside stagnant pay.
Arin Dube’s Wage Standard, covered recently in ProMarket, contends that within the same time period covered in Mutiny, Americans experienced an uncommonly tight labor market, which followed a longer era of slack labor markets and stagnant pay. Those two factors afforded workers the motives and opportunities to bolster their assertiveness in the workplace once the job market picked up again. That is, prolonged years of enshittified jobs and anemic compensation motivated workers to better their conditions, and a suddenly tight labor market afforded workers the opportunity to organize with a greater level of security provided by the prospect of being able to find a new job if they were punished for asserting themselves.
While I have no doubts that Schieber is correct in citing the college-educated workforce as an ingredient in the resurgent labor movement, given these competing causal mechanisms, however, I am not wholly persuaded that underemployed college-educated workers are the critical load-bearing element of this labor Jenga tower. On this point, the Hollywood Writers Guild of America stands out as the odd duck among the three primary case studies in Mutiny. Specifically, the WGA has long been a college-educated workforce. Hence, unlike the other cases examined in Mutiny, we cannot really attribute its more assertive behaviors to a change in the internal educational demographics of the industry. An enshittified workplace, however, can help explain the WGA case more effectively.
A second point of interest in Mutiny is the diversity of the unions discussed. Here, I’ll offer a theoretical distinction between feral and domesticated unions, which we can place at opposite ends of a spectrum. By a feral union, I denote labor organizing done without legal sanction, often in the face of violent repression, and intended to vigorously contest corporate power. I have in mind here the early labor uprisings that faced down U.S. Army troops and aerial bombardments. In contrast, a domesticated union is an established, legally recognized institution playing within the official and unofficial rules of the game. I use the “domestication” language here to capture how early feral unions (and protest movements generally), by gaining legal recognition, are folded into the existing system in exchange for refraining from being too disruptive. As a point of emphasis, this feral/domestic distinction is not about designating one or the other as “good/bad,” but merely to speak to variations in how labor strategically orients itself with or against the existing system.
Within Mutiny, we see a variety of unions that are distributed along that feral/domesticated spectrum. The United Auto Workers, as it is initially introduced by Schieber, fits the mold of a domesticated union, in that its “relationship with the Big Three [carmakers] was long ago designed to be predictable, allowing the companies to plan around each four-year contract cycle with minimal disruption” [emphasis added]. Schieber recounts the UAW engaging in well-choreographed negotiations with the automakers that achieved regular marginal improvements for workers, and this strategy was facilitated by the UAW internally running as a competitive authoritarian regime that allowed its ruling caucus to choose its leaders without meaningful member input and sustain itself in power for 70 years.
In the course of Mutiny’s narrative, we witness the UAW transform in a feral direction through an internal revolution that displaced the old junta with the newly elected President Shawn Fain, whom Schieber compares to the first (feral) generation of UAW leaders in the 1936-7 Flint Sit-Down Strike. Fain is depicted as distinctly less compliant with the Big Three with assertive demands for improved compensation. That pugnacious approach is illustrated by Fain’s willingness to actually disrupt the automakers’ operations by leading the UAW to its first simultaneous strike against all three companies. This feral/domestic dimension is also detectable in the differences of approach between the on-the-ground union organizers at Starbucks and the assistance they received from the Service Employees International Union. Throughout Mutiny, these contrasts often repeat between the élan of a new generation and the settled (sclerotic?) ways of older unions.
As a concluding thought, I will admit frustration with “overproduction of elites” arguments in general, though I express this from a philosophic rather than economic perspective. Specifically, I offer that the “overproduction” framing Schieber advances through frequent invocations of “too many people with expensive credentials chased too few jobs” reveals an impoverished lens for valuing education. The economic appraisal of education does not view the development of human capacities as an end in itself, but merely as an instrumental means to serve market demands. When human knowledge and talents are conceived in the latter instrumental sense, it becomes easy to conclude that the elites at the top of society ought to throttle/suppress the human development of the masses to prevent destabilizing “overproduction.”
Wendy Brown argued that neoliberal thinking flattened how we value education into being merely a servile education to meet economic needs. That precludes us from thinking about a liberal education that helps humans to build better versions of themselves toward the aspiration that they can make their lives works of art; something an individual wants to perfect and beautify through how they cultivate their unique human excellences. None of this is to deny that burdening students with excessive debt for degrees that do not help their long-term material success is a critical social problem. It is to say that in adopting the “overproduction” lens, Schieber has brought in this unacknowledged neoliberal assumption that all education today is servile education. It is the same ideology that has degraded the job market for so many Americans and against which workers college-educated and not are fighting in search of dignity and security.
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