[Francesca Noam Scheiber, welcome to Writer's Voice. [Noam Scheiber] Thanks for having me, great to be here. [Francesca Your book, Mutiny, the Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, begins with Starbucks baristas on strike in Chicago during the Red Cup Rebellion. First of all, tell us what that was, for those of us who may not remember, and why did you begin there? [Noam Scheiber] Yeah, so this was a strike, a kind of a nationwide strike in the fall of 2022. And the Starbucks workers had begun to unionize actually the year before, late in 2021. And that union campaign starts in Buffalo with just union elections at three stores. They won two of them. And then this just kind of explodes in a very organic way. So in January, maybe another half a dozen stores in different cities across the country file for union elections. And by February, it's a dozen or two dozen. And by March, I believe it was about 60 stores. And then by the summer, it was well over 100. And so this thing just spread and spread. And as it spread, I was covering it for the New York Times. I would get on the phone with the people who were organizing the stores and people who were workers. And I noticed after talking to several of them that they had a lot in common. They seemed to fit a kind of similar sociological profile. Many of the people who were working at the stores and trying to organize a union were college grads. Often they had a lot of debt. Often they had hoped to be working other jobs in the fields that they had trained for in college. But that was not happening. And so there was a fair amount of frustration, both with their trajectory kind of post-college and then also with the working conditions at Starbucks. So this was really kind of my entree into the broader group that I write about in the book, the so-called college-educated working class. And my first encounter with it was in Starbucks. And I think kind of the trajectory of these workers at Starbucks really tracks the broader phenomenon very well. This was a generation of folks who was given a very hard sell about why they need to go to college. You know, everyone from President Clinton, Bush, Obama said, you know, college is no longer optional. We've got to send everybody to college, you know, their family members. They did more to prepare to go to college than any generation in history. They took, you know, more AP classes. They spent more money on SAT test prep. They did more homework. And then more of them than ever did go to college. And then unfortunately, when they graduated, typically after the Great Recession through the 2010s into the early 2020s, the reality that awaited them wasn't the one that they anticipated. And so it was a lot of frustration. And as I said, the first place I kind of saw that manifest itself was with a lot of these college-educated workers at Starbucks. [Francesca So fill out that picture a little bit. What has happened to those college-educated workers? And how did the Great Recession and COVID compound the injury? I mean, you mentioned Obama, and I know you wrote a book called The Escape Artist, how Obama's team fumbled the recovery. Well, I remember, I'm not so sure some of it was fumbled. I remember when the first thing Obama did was appoint Goldman Sachs folks to guide the recovery from the recession and bailed out Wall Street, did not bail out Main Street. [Noam Scheiber] Yeah, so there's a lot there. But yeah, so in the 80s and 90s and into the early 2000s, the return on going to college was very high, and it was growing. This was partly because the job market was very strong. The demand for college grads was strong. It was partly because there weren't that many of them, relatively speaking, in the economy. So they were an exclusive group. And it was partly because the cost of college wasn't yet astronomically high. And so the debt that you graduated with wasn't yet so high. But the demand for college grads starts to change a bit in the early 2000s, even before the Great Recession. And then, of course, the recession really blows a hole in the economy. It hits everybody very hard. But we see unemployment and underemployment for college grads really shoots up. But what's interesting about the trajectory for college grads, and specifically for young college grads, is the job market really doesn't ever recover after that. So we see this kind of broader bounce back in the economy. But if you look at employment rates and wages for recent college grads, even a decade after the Great Recession, they're still pretty lousy. And then, of course, the pandemic hits in 2020, and that kind of upends the job market all over again. So really, since the 2004-2005 range to the present, it's been a pretty rough ride for young college grads. On your point about Obama, yes, the argument in my first book was that they just didn't do enough to respond to the Great Recession. They obviously passed a very large stimulus, large by historical standards. But even by the estimate of their own economists, I did a lot of reporting about the internal debate within the Obama White House about how much they actually needed to spend to fill this gaping hole in the economy. And Obama's own economist, his chief White House economist, Christina Romer, estimated that they needed to spend well in excess of a trillion dollars so that the economy would recover on a reasonable timetable. They ended up spending under $800 billion. That was not nothing, obviously, but it really did lead the recovery to take much, much longer than it otherwise might have. And that impacted young college grads very hard in particular. [Francesca And Noam Scheiber in Mutiny, of course, right there in the subtitle is the college-educated working class. Traditionally, people think of the working class as being factory workers. What defines working class as in the college-educated group? [Noam Scheiber] Yeah, so this is interesting. This is a debate I feel like we have a lot in political campaigns. I think it's a fair question. I think of a working class, I guess I think of it a couple of different directions. But one element of working class, I think, is sort of how much independence, how much autonomy you have on your job. And I think traditionally, a lot of people who go to college become professionals. One of the things that defines them and their career path, maybe even more than their income, is the amount of autonomy and judgment that they have in kind of agency, I guess. And that has really defined knowledge workers and professionals for going on a century now. And I think what you see is that post Great Recession, you have a lot of people who go to college and they end up doing jobs that don't require a degree. And beyond that, there are jobs that just don't give them a lot of room for independent thought, for autonomous judgment. And that has been a real source of frustration, again, sometimes even more than just income itself. And so one example that I give, I sort of allude to it in the book, but I've written a lot about it in recent years, is the example of doctors. So doctors are folks who have traditionally treated patients the way that they thought was in the best interest of the patients. They do a long internship and residency. They have a lot of kind of post-college training beyond medical school even. And what that training instills in them is the sense that you have a set of skills and you use those skills as you deem appropriate to treat a patient. And what's happened with doctors over the past 15, 20 years is there's just been a huge consolidation in the healthcare industry. So doctors who used to own their own practices or be in a relatively small practice where they had a lot of space to do the job as they saw fit, they are now essentially employees in huge medical systems. So sometimes these medical systems control dozens of hospitals and employ thousands of doctors and tens of thousands of other healthcare workers. And in that shift, doctors feel like they are now essentially workers. They're not professionals. They're not owners. The people at the top of these huge healthcare conglomerates, they tell them how long they can spend with patients. They tell them how long they can keep patients in the hospital. They tell them what questions they have to ask patients. There's just this huge checklist. And so all of their daily tasks are now much more rigidly controlled and monitored in a way that makes them feel much more like workers. And so I think even a doctor, you could argue, the way that that profession has evolved, it's evolved in a way that has taken this group of people who are traditionally very much professionals, knowledge workers, and turned them much more into workers, arguably even a form of the working class. So it's a concept that I think it's a little abstract, but if you think about it in the context of specific jobs, you see how people have developed over the past few decades, much more of a kind of worker consciousness than a professional consciousness. [Francesca Well, one of the things that characterizes professional versus worker is individualism versus collective consciousness. So I wonder if you could talk about that frame as part of this growth in the rise of labor organizing among this college educated working class. [Noam Scheiber] Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. There is a much greater sense of common interests of solidarity among people who went to college. I've been covering labor and workers for The Times for over a decade now. I started in 2015. And when I started working on this beat, anytime I would talk to a group of white collar workers, professional workers, they just thought of themselves as like, oh, we have these particular grievances in our particular workplace. Maybe it's pay. Maybe it's hours, overtime, benefits, whatever it is. But it was very sort of highly specific to their job and their workplace and maybe their industry. And what I've seen since certainly since the pandemic is, as you say, much greater sense of collective consciousness and solidarity. I saw this a lot during the strikes of 2023. And I think we even saw it in the polling data that came out. So you had the United Automobile Workers go on this strike in 23. That was a very high profile strike. It was a very aggressive set of tactics that the union used. And often historically, when one group of workers has gone on strike, a lot of other workers, their response is a little grudging. What makes these people so special? Why do they think they can kind of shut down this part of the economy to get a few more dollars an hour? But in this case, we saw the polling was so supportive of the UAW and not just among other blue collar workers, but even more so among college educated workers. I think Gallup did a poll in the summer of 2023, and it showed that about 70, 75 percent of workers of people overall supported the auto workers over the companies. But among college educated workers, actually slightly higher, even higher than 75 percent. So you really start to see the development of this worker consciousness of this collective identity in a way that you hadn't. And just really came through in a lot of the reporting that I did, talking to workers. Again, if you go back to doctors, I was covering a group of doctors in Minnesota who organized a union in 2023, right around the same time. And those doctors were following the UAW strike very closely. One of them even told me that he took his two kids to a UAW picket line in Minnesota because he really wanted them to see the importance of solidarity, the importance of standing with fellow workers. So I do think that's absolutely right. I think you've seen this real growth in a kind of group identity in a way that just didn't exist a few decades ago. [Francesca Well, that's so interesting because you also make a direct connection between the growth of the UAW itself or the penetration of the UAW itself into organizing professional workers. I used to be one of them. I was the head of, I was actually in management, but we all agreed to be in the union. But you make a connection between how the UAW went outside of the industrial sphere and how that changed the union and even Sean Fain, who was an auto worker. [Noam Scheiber] Yeah, absolutely. So the UAW has been organizing grad students and white collar workers for a few decades now, but you really see it start to accelerate over the past decade or two and really post the NLRB under Obama, hands down a ruling that allows grad students in the private sector to be unionized, to be considered workers, not just students. And so that does accelerate the organizing of the UAW. And I think at the same time that that's happening, you have this real downward mobility among grad students, among academics. If you look from sort of the early 2000s to the present, the proportion of academics who are on the tenure track really starts to nosedive. So we go from a majority tenure or tenure track system of higher education to a majority non-tenure track, so more non-tenure professors, more adjuncts, more grad students doing teaching. And it really changes the nature of higher education and changes the nature of academic labor. And what's interesting about this, I think, is at first glance, you might think, well, what does the UAW know about higher education? What does it know about their workplace and their jobs and their working conditions? But I think what's actually happening during this time is the higher ed workplace is becoming much more factory-like. You're getting these huge classes and you're forcing adjuncts and graduate students to teach just hundreds and hundreds of students. And it becomes much more industrialized, a lot less agency and much more just like, I've got to just grade these hundreds of exams. I've got to teach hundreds of students. And there's just no way to kind of individualize instruction in that context. So as higher ed takes on this more industrialized model, I think it really dovetails with the kind of objectives, the organizing objectives and the bargaining objectives of the UAW. And so you find that the union is really able to make inroads. Now, obviously, there's still different, there are kind of cultural differences, anthropological differences. People who go to grad school have just a different sort of vocabulary and different values and different ideas about how work should be done than people who work in the factory. But yes, you find that they're able to forge this coalition. There's a group called Unite All Workers for Democracy. So UAWD, kind of a play on UAW. And this is a group that is a coalition between factory workers, UAW factory workers and grad students. And these folks come together and are able to really reform the union. The union had a referendum on whether they should directly elect their leadership because traditionally it was done through a kind of representative vote at the convention. And that allowed the kind of insider party of the UAW to main control of the union for more than 70 years. But this group comes together, they win this referendum. So it becomes one member, one vote. And then once they win that referendum, they turn around and elect a reformist leader, Sean Thain, as you say, who comes out of the autoworker portions of the UAW, but it has real ambitious ideas about how to reform the union and make it more militant. And so that coalition of grad students and academic workers and autoworkers within the UAW really does completely change the orientation of the union. It ends up leading them to this very aggressive strike. The strike I think is widely thought of as pretty successful and not the kind of strike that would have been undertaken under the old leadership of the UAW. And so it's just one place, I think, where we do see that even though these folks come from different workplaces and there's a different kind of work culture in the different workplaces, they are able to come together effectively and kind of flex their muscles and build power for the members of the union. [Francesca Yeah. And Sean Thain has a very explicit concept of power and critique of the billionaire class. And I think that this points to the fact that there is a larger critique that this group has. And I'll probably get back to that, but you said the word dignity before. And I think that this is critical. And not that dignity never existed in the labor movement as a concept before. It certainly did. All the way back to the Lawrence textile strike where they talk about bread and roses, that was the song. And certainly politicians, Sherrod Brown in Ohio talks about the dignity of work and has been doing that for a long time. But talk about this confluence of a growing demand for dignity on the job along with a growing understanding of the systemic class inequality in this country. [Noam Scheiber] So I'll start with an anecdote because this anecdote really brought it home for me while I was reporting and researching the book. So one of the people I focus on in the book is a guy named Teddy Hoffman who was very successful, grew up in Minneapolis, went to Grinnell College in Iowa, did very well at Grinnell and then won this prestigious postgraduate fellowship called the Watson Fellowship that allowed him to travel the world for a year. But when he came back, he ended up taking a job at Starbucks just while he got his feet under him. And one thing led to another and ended up being there for several years. The pandemic was one reason. And so he's a very academically successful, very promising former college student. And he ends up at Starbucks much longer than he anticipates. And at one point he's, I think this is like the second year that he's working at Starbucks, he's serving a customer and she looks at his green apron, you know, the Starbucks folks wear these green aprons. And she looks at the apron and says, I didn't know you all had names. And she meant that she didn't know that they had name tags, but actually said, I didn't know you had names. And for him, this just completely underscores how sort of dehumanizing this job can be at times where you're just in this assembly line where people are coming and they're lining up and they're ordering these drinks with 15 different modifiers and they're still, you know, they still want it done in 30 seconds or less. And it can really be a sort of dehumanizing experience. And so I think a lot of the people who went to college and then ended up in jobs like jobs at Starbucks or the Apple store or Trader Joe's, I think there's just a real tension there because one thing college does, and, you know, maybe the most important thing it does is teach you or sort of inculcates a sense of agency. You're supposed to think for yourself. You're supposed to have opinions. You know, you're supposed to speak out on behalf of those opinions. And then suddenly you end up in one of these service jobs and it feels like all those things that you were taught and the whole experience of college was building toward are things that you're supposed to suddenly suppress. And that if you don't suppress them, that could be bad, you know, bad for your career. You could get disciplined. You could be fired. So I think there's just such a dissonance between the experience of going to college and then the experience of ending up in one of these jobs, especially, you know, one of these sort of customer facing jobs where you're supposed to really go out of your way to do everything that the customer wants, even if that the customer ends up being, you know, grumpy or arbitrary. And it's a real shock to a lot of these folks. And I think that's where the sort of demands for dignity arose, you know, just a sense that college taught us to be three dimensional humans, you know, and really to to kind of actualize ourselves in a whole variety of ways. And the experience of working in these jobs is the opposite of self-actualization. You know, it's very much an alienating experience. And so I think that the tension between those two things really gives rise to a whole set of grievances and frustrations that bubbles up into this labor movement. [Francesca Let's talk for a moment about the corporations. Howard Schultz spent an estimated $240 million on anti-union activities, including $100 million in legal fees. One striking theme in your book is that companies with progressive public identities like Starbucks, like Apple, and even parts of Hollywood were fiercely resistant when workers demanded power. What did you learn about the limits of corporate progressivism? [Noam Scheiber] Yeah, it's a fascinating question. And to be fair to Schultz and to Starbucks, I think they were a legitimately progressive employer, at least as the service industry goes. So when Schultz takes the company public in the 90s, he gives every barista stock in the company. And, you know, if you were just a kind of ordinary barista, you made tens of thousands of dollars when that company went public. They were very early to offer health care benefits to part-timers. You know, by the 90s, they were doing that. And that was very unusual. President Clinton even invites Schultz to this conference, this White House conference on health care, because, you know, they were kind of on the vanguard of doing that. So I think in their way, they were a pretty progressive company in the 90s. I think what ends up happening is, and we see this across a lot of companies that were sort of progressive, you know, whether it's Trader Joe's or Apple, generally paid good benefits and treated their workers pretty well, is that sometime in the 2000s, often it's around the time of the Great Recession or, you know, a little bit after, a little before, they start to really pinch pennies. You know, the sort of economic forces bearing down on them around this time really caused them to take another look at how generous they're being to their workers. So in the case of Starbucks, Schultz actually was no longer the CEO. He had stepped aside, but came back, well, I guess in early 2008, as the Great Recession was really putting the company under enormous pressure. And he comes back and he closes a bunch of stores and he makes the health care less generous and the retirement benefits become optional. And another thing he does is move to this sort of just-in-time labor system. They implement all this sophisticated scheduling software that exactly balances supply and demand. So it used to be that a Starbucks worker could, you know, if they were full time, they could plan on getting their 35, 40 hours a week and just have those hours and the income to depend on. And what happens after Schultz comes back and implements this scheduling software is the hours become much more variable and the income becomes more variable. So maybe you're scheduled 35 hours a week, but you get to one shift and it's supposed to be six or eight hours, but it's not very busy that afternoon. So the manager sends you home after an hour and 12 minutes or whatever it is. And suddenly you can't count on the income that you thought you had from this job. And that becomes very stressful for the workers. They start to feel much, much more precarious. And I think in the mind of someone like Howard Schultz, though, they still think of themselves as a very progressive, very generous, highly evolved employer. And so it's not, you know, if you're someone like Schultz and you have this track record going back a decade or two of treating your employees well, when you're doing the things that you think you need to do just so that the company survives, you don't think, oh, I'm becoming less generous. You just think, well, these are sort of existentially necessary moves. But over time, you know, the employees really start to feel that and they really become frustrated and alienated. And I think by the late 2010s, Starbucks had become, you know, very, very profitable. Again, the changes that Schultz had made to right the ship financially had proved very successful. But the workers experienced that as just a much more, you know, a much less generous employer that led to a much more precarious existence. And so there just ends up being this gap between the employers who think of themselves, who continue to think of themselves as as progressive and generous and the lived reality of employees who experience all these cutbacks and the insecurity and the precarity. And I think that is what we end up seeing kind of bubble up during the pandemic. [Francesca Well, it goes beyond less generous benefits. Starbucks deployed a three phase counterinsurgency. Talk about their anti-union strategy and corporate anti-union strategy in general. [Noam Scheiber] Yeah. So as you say, they spent tens of millions of dollars on lawyers and the lawyers have a very extensive and sophisticated template for how they respond to union campaigns. The term of art in the industry is union avoidance. So these are experts in union avoidance. And so Starbucks had this firm, Littler Mendelsohn, that is very well known for its union avoidance practice. And yeah, so there are three phases, as you say. The first phase, this thing starts off in Buffalo and they send just a ton of executives, Starbucks executives from Seattle to come to Buffalo and basically to live there for the fall of 2021. So even from the very top, I think their president of operations for North America actually leads this. She goes there and then they have a bunch of lawyers and they bring all these managers from out of town. They call them support managers. But what's really happening is they're going and they're kind of piling into these stores who have filed petitions for union votes and where there's going to be a union election. And they're basically just trying to, it's a kind of good cop, bad cop routine. They're trying to be very helpful and they're trying to be solicitous and ask them what they could change and if there's anything they think could be fixed about their stores. And they're holding meetings and trying to get feedback and even doing the dirty work, taking out garbage and cleaning dishes and things like that. So they're trying to really win them over with their solicitousness. But at the same time, they're holding these meetings where they try to create anxiety about what unionizing could entail. The sort of classic template is to say, well, who can say if you unionize, you could do better, but you could definitely do worse too. Everything's on the table if you unionize. And it really starts to create some fear and anxiety in the minds of the workers. And of course, just having the president of retail for North America standing in your store if you're some barista in Buffalo is itself pretty intimidating. It's not a person these people normally come into contact with. And suddenly, executives like that are in your store and they're coming in daily or several times a week for several months. So that's kind of phase one. And then what happens is this thing gets traction and starts spreading, as I described earlier, to first a half dozen and a dozen and dozens of stores. And so they realize it's going to be very difficult to send executives or even managers from out of town into every store. So then they realize that they have to take a different tactic. And so at this point, there's more of a kind of template that they just send to individual managers and district managers in different parts of the country. They tell them, in so many words, you are not supposed to crack down on anybody. The law says you can't discipline people for forming a union. You can't fire them. So you should follow the law. But you also shouldn't overlook anything, right? So they start enforcing rules very, very literally, rules that had previously not been enforced at all or not very often or in a pretty lax way. And so suddenly they started enforcing these rules very, very literally. And lots of union supporters get disciplined or fired. Starbucks will say people who were not union supporters also got disciplined and fired. They were not singling out union supporters. But in the minds of people who were organizing their campaigns, suddenly it was like a hair trigger. They felt like they could be forced out at any time. And then what happens finally after that is Starbucks actually makes some sort of policy changes at the macro level. So instead of introducing new benefits that apply to everyone, union stores and non-union stores, they start introducing benefits that only apply to non-union stores. And again, this is very alarming to folks who are thinking about unionizing or in the process of unionizing, because Starbucks is traditionally, as we've discussed, been a place where the benefits are pretty attractive. People often go there specifically for the health benefits. And suddenly the company is introducing new benefits and even raising wages, but only for non-union stores. And so this starts to create real anxiety in the minds of people who are thinking about unionizing, thinking, oh, well, you know, if we unionize, are we going to lose our benefits? Are we going to be kind of second class? And so it really does create a lot of fear. And I think you see the number of stores that are interested in unionizing really start to taper off and decline in a very serious in the summer of 22 when that starts to happen. [Francesca You also talk about the Amazon labor union story, which is both inspiring and cautionary. It started in Amazon facility, Amazon warehouse in New Jersey with Chris Small's victory. He was, I guess he was a low-level supervisor, and this was during COVID, and he walked out because of the lack of protection with PPE at the Amazon warehouse. And that was successful, but a second facility right next door, right nearby, failed. So tell us what Chris Small's victory and the later fracture of the union can tell us about, you know, some of the barriers or contradictions in this kind of organizing. [Noam Scheiber] So that's exactly right. Chris Small had worked at Amazon for several years. He'd worked his way up to kind of an hourly supervisor, so not like a salaried manager, but an hourly supervisor. He'd been pretty successful there. This was actually in Staten Island, the warehouse was called JFK-8. So first of all, Chris Small is just a very savvy and charismatic person. So in a way it was, he's a kind of sui generis figure. He'd had real credibility, you know, both from working at Amazon for a long time and then for being fired after he spoke up about concerning working conditions during COVID. And the thing I think that made that union campaign on Staten Island successful was Chris Small was able to put together a kind of coalition. You know, in that warehouse on Staten Island, there were very liberal people who were Bernie supporters. There were very conservative people who were Trump supporters. There were people who had gone to college. Even one of the folks very active in the organizing had a PhD. There were a lot of people who had not gone to college. You know, some people hadn't graduated from high school. And Chris Small was very, very good at putting together this kind of multi-class, multi-racial coalition and uniting those folks. And in a way, I think the folks who were involved in that campaign will tell you that Amazon, by the way that it responded to the campaign initially, helped forge that coalition. So at one point, Chris Small comes back onto the facilities grounds to deliver food because they would often have these events where the union would provide food and try to have workers socialize with one another and get to know one another. At one point, they call the police when he refused to leave the premises and the police end up handcuffing him and taking him away. And this is something that played very badly among workers from across different backgrounds at Amazon. So in certain ways, Amazon made some mistakes that helped Smalls forge this coalition, but he was very skilled and very charismatic. And so he was a natural leader. But what we see is that after that victory, some of these divisions of race and class really do start to bear down on the union. There's a disagreement over strategy. A lot of the people who helped organize the union felt like they should really just focus on that warehouse. You know, it was several thousand people. It was a very big undertaking just to get Amazon to the bargaining table because Amazon was refusing to recognize the union and even to recognize the outcome of the election. So there was one camp that thought, we really just need to focus here. You know, we need to kind of continue to organize. We need to build power within this facility. We need to be able to strike if we need to. And Smalls' view was, no, we need to let a thousand flowers bloom. Any other warehouse that wants to organize, we should support them. And so he ended up traveling the country a lot and kind of trying to spread the word. And so you end up seeing these other campaigns. One, as you say, was right next door in another facility on Staten Island. One was just outside Albany in New York. One was in Southern California. And all these other campaigns end up failing. So this just leads to a lot of recriminations and increasingly sort of intense debate, not just over strategy, but over how democratic the union is. There was a feeling that Smalls was unilaterally making too many decisions that it needed to be a much more democratic operation. But really, I think, ultimately, as the tension grew, it was these divisions along race and class that really ended up doing it in. You know, it's not a totally hopeless story. Smalls ended up stepping down as the president. Another organizer there named Connor Spence, who was also very capable, ended up taking over. They had another election that he won. They later affiliated with the Teamsters Union to try to get more resources and everything from lawyers and PR people to just money to help them organize and strike if they need to. So they're still at it. But yes, absolutely the case that some of these divisions and contradictions that Smalls was very skillfully able to navigate during the union campaign itself ultimately kind of come to the fore as things get a little tougher after they win and try to bargain a contract. [Francesca You also talk about the Apple workers. One of them is Chaya Barrett, who, you know, was an Apple true believer. That story also points to real differences in the resources that black college graduates have versus white college graduates, resources that you argue that the companies really ignore when they make assumptions about the resiliency of their workforce and how they can take advantage of that. So what are the particular vulnerabilities of black college graduates? And how did that weigh in, in terms of the organizing at the Apple store in Tacoma, Maryland, I believe it was? [Noam Scheiber] Towson, Maryland. So yeah, just outside of Baltimore. You're absolutely right. Chaya was someone who had dreamed of working at Apple. She was a self-described Apple fangirl from a very young age. She had an iPod that she got, I think, when she was in third grade and still had it as an adult. And yeah, so long time Apple fan and ends up starting to work at an Apple store outside Baltimore when she's in college. Her generation, I think, is very instructive about what's going on in the kind of broader workforce and economy. She went to a big public high school outside of Baltimore. It was majority black, and they were very, very focused on sending as many graduates as possible to college. She talks about how when she was in high school, the principal really encouraged all the students to post their acceptance letters on the wall of the office so that everyone could see how well people were doing and where they were going to college. So a lot of pressure, and I don't mean that in a negative way, just a lot of support, trying to encourage people to go to college. A lot of people in her graduating class did go to college. She ends up at Towson University and graduates, but she graduates in the 2010s. And it's just that, as we discussed, the job market for college grads is not great. She applies to dozens of different companies, hoping to do a job in marketing or instructional design, doing training for big tech companies, ends up not getting any traction with that. So she just stays with her college job at the Apple Store and does that full time after graduating. And Apple is an interesting place. Like Starbucks, it had long offered very generous benefits. And so I think in some sense, you want to call them out for that and acknowledge that there were a lot of benefits. People did get stock, they had very generous leave policies. But yes, I think the implementation of some of these policies often was a little blind to some of the unique challenges facing the black employees. After the Great Recession, as hard as it was on white college grads, black college grads did even worse. It took far longer for their incomes to recover and for their unemployment rate to recover. And so there was a lot of precariousness among black college grads in particular. And in Kaya's case, she just kind of illustrates some of the gaps in these benefits at Apple. And so at one point, she ends up taking a leave of absence from Apple because her sister had a very, serious health condition and her sister had a daughter. And Kaya was going to help take care of her sister's daughter while her sister underwent a procedure that kept her in the hospital for months. And so Kaya takes a leave of absence. Apple actually has a pretty generous leave policy where you can get up to 12 weeks of paid leave. Kaya applies for the leave, gets the leave. But because of just the kind of administrative process of executing the paid leave, she goes three paycheck cycles without getting paid. And so during this time, it's incredibly stressful. She's not only not getting paid, but she's got more expenses because she's now taking care of her niece. She ends up in this cascade of financial problems. Her utility bills go unpaid. So the power company shuts off her electricity. She ends up getting behind on her car payments and her car gets repossessed. It's just a series of one thing after another. And by the time the pay starts kicking in, she's already in this hole and kind of spiraling downward and it's just a big disaster. So yeah, I think it's a great example of how you can drop a set of benefits on paper that look very generous and to many people are generous. If you were someone who came from a middle or upper middle class background, your family had resources, your parents could cut you a check for a few thousand dollars until you started getting paid again, then it would have been trivial to navigate this. But in Kaya's case, she didn't have those resources. And so it ends up sending her on this downward financial spiral that I think could have been easily avoided if someone had just been thinking that this was a potential issue. [Francesca You also talk about the Hollywood writer's strike. It's one of the book's major examples of professional precarity. How did streaming change what it means to be a working writer? And then I'm going to ask you about AI. [Noam Scheiber] So the writers are a very interesting example because it's traditionally been a career that's very hard to break into. Obviously, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who want to write for Hollywood, but only a few thousand of them at any given time can make it. And so historically what's happened is it's very difficult to break in. But once you break in, you're on a pretty cushy path. So historically, network television shows and traditional cable shows offered writers work pretty much year round, 40 weeks a year. And because of the contract that the unions there are able to negotiate, you end up doing very well financially. Typical writer would make hundreds of thousands of dollars working 40 weeks a year. These shows often ran for many seasons at a time. So if you're on a network show, could easily end up working there six, seven, eight, 10 years. So if you were able to make it into that society, that elite group, you did very well. But what happens in the streaming era is the model completely changes. So there are many more shows. So that's good because it means more writers. But these shows often last for much, much shorter periods of time. Instead of working 40, 42, 44 weeks a year, maybe you're working 20 weeks a year. And instead of a show lasting six or eight or 10 years, often these shows are done after a year or maybe two years. And so what's happening is people are constantly having to hustle for a new job. You no longer have an income that can sustain you for a whole year. You suddenly need a whole bunch of side gigs. And certainly you can't count on having that same job for many years in a row. And then the other thing that's a little bit subtle, but I think very important in the changing economics of Hollywood is it used to be the case that writers got what's called overscale. So you not only got paid for every week that you were in the writer's room, but you typically got paid above that amount because of your role as a producer. So the idea was you're not just writing the script, but you're creating this whole fictional universe. And that is the role of a producer. And people would go on set and they'd be there with the director and even in post-production. So they were writers, yes, but they were also producers and they got compensated for being producers. And what happens in the streaming era is the big studios really try to take away that second piece. So we're just going to have you write and then we'll take your scripts and we'll do the rest and you're on your own after that. And so what happens is people end up not getting this overscale compensation. And the interesting consequence of that is a very junior writer is now not that much cheaper than a very, very experienced writer. And so in this hustle, every few months, you're having to go find another gig. Suddenly the junior writers are having a lot of trouble getting jobs because they no longer have a cost advantage. So suddenly what you have is people who go to college, they spend, you know, eight, 10 years trying to break into this industry. And during that eight or 10 year period, they're not making much money at all. You know, they're assistants and kind of gophers and they're typically making minimum wage or, you know, maybe they're making 15, $16 an hour. And then finally they break in, you know, after eight, 10 years and they get that first job. And that first job used to be your entree into this pretty cushy upper middle-class existence. But what's happening now is you get that first job. And then suddenly the writer's room breaks up in three months and you're out there looking again for another job. And you can't find one because everyone else is looking for another job. And there are people with much more experience than you and they don't get paid much more than you. So what we start to see is people break in, they get this first job. That first job used to set them, you know, onto this career that was a very rewarding and generously compensated career. Now they get this first job and then often they have these long bouts of unemployment, you know, a year or two years. And when they finally get their next job, it's not a writing job. They go back to being an assistant, you know, and they have to kind of work their way up again. And so it ends up being this highly destabilizing labor market for writers in the streaming era. And that just ends up being incredibly radicalizing. And you have even people who have done the job, you know, have been successful, who wrote for many years for a network show or a traditional cable show. And they're finding that they have trouble getting another job and they're having to endure long bouts of unemployment. So in that turmoil, in that precariousness, you suddenly get this group of people who had thought of themselves as the winners in the economy, as sort of upper middle class and beyond, very affluent. A lot of anxiety about downward mobility that really fuels the strike. And as you say, the final piece of it ends up being artificial intelligence, because now it's not just that you're going to work for a show for three months and then possibly be unemployed for a year or two. Now it's this machine may just do your job altogether. Maybe they'll call you in to punch up a script or an outline that the AI generates, but there is now a risk that your job is completely or largely automated and you're just there, no longer doing it as a professional would, but doing it as a kind of factory worker would. They just send you these AI generated scripts and you punch them on and move them along to the next step. And so that was completely horrifying to all these workers, especially again, after a decade in which the labor market had completely changed. And so this strike, which actually starts off trying to address some of these deeper issues in the labor market, trying to create more stability in a kind of a higher floor for writers, it suddenly gets supercharged when they start to fear that the studios really want to replace them with AI. And that's what really kind of powers them through this five month long strike that is obviously incredibly hard on the folks who are going without work during this time. And all of Hollywood is really shut down, but it's this sort of existential dread of AI that really unites them and allows them to power through it and ultimately get some, some guarantees, both guarantees that they won't be replaced with AI and guarantees that they'll have a more generous compensation, you know, that the studios will have a set period of time where they employ writers and a set number of writers that they employ on shows. So it ends up being a fairly successful strike though, very traumatizing in a way for a lot of the people who were involved. [Francesca Yeah. And I think that that strike showed real power. And one of the things you say in the book is that companies were surprised at the shift that they perceived in the balance of power between workers and companies. And I guess my question is with AI and with Trump and the erosion of American democracy, do you think that's still true? [Noam Scheiber] It's an interesting question. You're absolutely right. I think there was this period in 2023 when a lot of employers had been using the same kind of union avoidance playbook for many years, and that playbook had been very successful. And then suddenly you had the workers very united and radicalized and willing to take like pretty aggressive action. And I think the employers in a lot of cases, especially in Hollywood, were really unprepared for that. It was true of the United Automobile Workers too. And so that was a moment where I think the workers and the unions were able to gain some leverage, partly because there was so much collective action and partly because the employers were caught off guard. It's an interesting moment now, as you say, Trump is now president, Biden was president at the time. Trump's NLRB is much less expansive in enforcing labor law. So employers have more advantage in these confrontations than they did. Obviously, AI has continued to make huge advances. And so that also has appeared to undermine the labor of workers. And then there's another wrinkle, which is since the Fed began to raise interest rates in 2022, a lot of companies that were hiring like crazy have shifted in the other direction and really started laying people off. That's been especially true in the tech space where we've just seen huge layoffs at Amazon and Facebook and Google and Microsoft. So that's been another shift that also appears to have undermined the power of workers. I think the countervailing force is the trend that we've discussed earlier, which is a real growing worker consciousness. I think we're now seeing that not just among workers like in Hollywood that have been unionized for a long time, or even among workers who are members of this college-educated working class, people like Kaia Barrett and Teddy Hoffman who work at Apple and Starbucks and other service sector jobs. But we're really seeing that pretty far up the income scale. And I think you see it especially in the tech sector. For so long, software engineers thought of themselves as a kind of privileged class of workers, people who were management adjacent. Often they were even owners, right? Because they got a ton of stock in the company and they really thought of their interests as being aligned with the company's interests. But in the past few years, I think that's really, really shifted. There's just been much more antagonism between the workers and the management of these companies. And so even as workers as a whole have lost leverage and these layoffs have created real anxiety among tech workers, there is this real increase in a kind of worker consciousness among tech workers in particular. And I think that's something that is allowing them to push back in a variety of ways. I mean, even at the kind of frontier of the tech industry and these cutting edge AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, we've actually seen the workers there exercise some power through collective action. So there was a moment when the Trump administration was demanding that AI companies make certain, allow the administration to remove certain safeguards on the AI if they were going to use the OpenAI or the Anthropic software. And the workers were not into that at all. They really stood up and said, no, we absolutely have to have these safeguards in place. And I think you saw Anthropic hit a stalemate with the Trump administration, partly in fairness because the company's stated philosophy is that it believes that AI should be used safely, but also very much because its workers very much believe this and they have a lot of power at that company. And I think you end up seeing OpenAI try to negotiate a slightly weaker deal with the Trump administration with fewer safeguards. And those employees at that company also kind of piped up and forced the company to at least say rhetorically that it was insisting on these safeguards as well. So even in the place where you think that the employers and the owners of the company have the most power, we're seeing that this kind of collective action among workers has been able to kind of alter the trajectory a bit. [Francesca And now finally, this is in some ways, you argue a different kind of working class, college educated, as opposed to, let's say, the non-college educated working class. That latter was supposed to have been supporting Trump more, whereas the college educated workers supported Democrats are more progressive. But you actually say that the views of college educated and non-college educated Americans converged significantly during the Biden years in more social and cultural issues. But there's been a huge increase in support for unionization among the general public that I think, if anything, might be stronger now than it even was before. So what hope do you see for a growing alliance between the different sectors of the working class? [Noam Scheiber] Yeah, it's a great question. And I think there's been a lot of discussion, certainly in the Trump era, about the gap between college educated voters and voters without a college degree. So when Obama ran for reelection in 2012, college educated folks split pretty evenly between Obama and his opponent, Mitt Romney, and non-college voters split pretty evenly. So you didn't really see much of what we call a diploma divide. But since Trump entered the political scene, we've seen this real gap opening up between how college educated voters vote and people without a degree. So in 2024, college educated voters supported Kamala Harris by about 14 points, and non-college voters supported Trump by a similar margin, about 13 points. So huge gap, huge increase in this so-called diploma divide. But yeah, I argue and believe that that gap is really overstated. And I think what's happening there is you see a certain set of issues that become salient in political elections that's not really reflective of their broader worldview. And what I mean by that is the election, particularly the 2024 election, was fought over cultural issues, wokeness, LGBTQ rights, things like that. And there are real gaps between college educated voters and non-college voters on those issues. But if you look at a whole other set of issues, and certainly economic issues, the size of government, the need for redistribution, support for universal health care, regulation of companies, taxation, there's a lot of agreement among college educated workers and non-college folks on these issues. That didn't always used to be the case. If you go back to the 1980s and 1990s, college educated voters in that period were well to the right of people without a degree on these economic issues. But starting around 2004, you start to see the college educated folks move a little to the left on those issues. And then, of course, after 2008, a huge shift to the left among the college educated voters. And they've been trending that way ever since. And so there's been this huge convergence among college and non-college folks on economic issues. And I guess my conjecture is that as economic anxiety generally and probably AI in particular raises the salience of these economic issues and makes that the battleground for political campaigns rather than some of these culture issues that recent presidential elections have been fought on, I think you will see voting patterns get much more similar than different. So you can imagine a kind of coalition of the so-called college educated working class and the more traditional working class if the biggest issue in the election is AI displacing humans in work. And I obviously don't have a crystal ball, but my guess, given how emotional an issue that AI is and how much organizing we're seeing just around data centers and attempts to block them and the anxiety about AI replacing white collar workers, my guess is that that will be a much more salient issue than kind of jobs and economic issues were in the 2016, 2020, and 24 election. Not to say that those weren't salient issues. Obviously, Trump really did make a lot of offshoring jobs and trade and immigration, but I think in the end, those issues ultimately were fought on cultural battlegrounds. And I would expect going forward that we'll see jobs and automation be much more salient. And on those issues, I think there's real alignment between college educated folks and non-college folks. [Francesca So the tech lords are the great uniters, not dividers. [Noam Scheiber] Yes. No, I have to say there is another book by two people whose work I follow very closely, specifically about organizing and the tech industry that's coming out in the fall. It's J.S. Tan and Clarissa Redwine. Their book is called Against Tech Oligarchy, Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry. And I learned a lot from reading a galley of that book and I've learned a lot from the work over the years. And I do think that you find that there is so much suspicion and anxiety about the power of a handful of tech companies that it is a highly unifying political issue. [Francesca Well, this is just a terrific book and a great read. Noam Scheiber, thank you so much for talking with us about Mutiny, the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. [Noam Scheiber] Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for taking it so seriously.