Mutiny The rise and revolt of the college-educated working class

This insightful investigation from New York Times reporter Scheiber (The Escape Artists) examines how a radical new cohort of young, college-educated workers at major American corporations powered a wave of unionizations and strikes in recent years. The "dismal economy" during and after the Great Recession led to many college graduates taking low-wage jobs in retail and customer service, or working for years for low pay within their profession. This widening "gap... between the expectations of many graduates and their actual prospects" fueled an upswing in labor activism. Scheiber tracks workers preparing to unionize at an Apple store in Towson, Md., and a Chicago Starbucks, along the way spotlighting other labor disputes and developments, such as the Writers Guild of America's 2023 strike and the United Auto Workers' election of president Shawn Fain by an insurgent collective of "fed-up autoworkers and... graduate students." Scheiber mixes nitty-gritty contract fights with poignant profiles of workers like Apple employee Chaya Barrett, who was "radicalized" by CEO Tim Cook's astronomical $750 million stock windfall ("I'm working my butt off for not even a full percent of what you just sold"), as well as glimpses of corporations' anti-union intimidation efforts, such as Starbucks establishing new benefits and wage increases only for non-union workers. It's a galvanizing look at a stymied white-collar generation with the "politics... of the proletariat." (Apr.)

Of predatory capitalism and its youthful discontents. Teddy Hoffman, one of the principals inNew York Times reporter Scheiber's morality play, worked at Starbucks for seven years after having graduated from Grinnell and won a prestigious research fellowship. As Scheiber notes, plenty of young people take such once-stopgap jobs on graduating until they find something better. "The difference for Teddy and his cohort," he writes, is that they happened to land in these jobs at the precise moment in history when it was likely to be a radicalizing experience." Another principal and academic standout, Chaya Barrett, worked in an Apple Store, another locus of employee dissent, the author writes, given the generational "suspicion of power merged with anger over their paychecks." Throughout the service sector, in places like Amazon, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe's, this dissent found voice in a strong movement to unionize. Sometimes the dissidents won, as with Hollywood screenwriters and graduate students at a few universities, and, as Scheiber writes, even pharmacists and doctors moved to unionize, "fed up with two decades of mergers and acquisitions that had made them feel like cogs in the medical-industrial complex." Hoffman and Barrett faced tougher opposition: Hoffman found himself slated to work fewer hours than before he began his union organizing, and continued resistance eventually led to his dismissal, and with a police escort to boot. Barrett and her Apple cohort had a somewhat better experience, but not without a bruising fight. Against this labor activism, driven by workers who were "college--educated and radicalized by tectonic economic and political upheavals," stands the odd fact that working-class people without college degrees have tended to support the right wing, perhaps themselves radicalized in opposition to liberalism--a problem, Scheiber observes, that progressives urgently need to address by finding commonalities of class interest, of which there are plenty. If you're wondering why so many young people lean toward socialism, this revealing book is for you. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.