Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
By Noam Scheiber
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2026

In the spring of 2022, a group of Chicago Starbucks workers and organizers sat together after filing their union election paperwork, radiating pride and anxiety. When the logistical talk had wound down and everyone had fallen silent, one worker noted that “this is the first time I’ve felt purpose in a really long time.”[1]

Noam Scheiber’s book Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class is filled with moments like these, where Millennial and Gen Z workers struggle with the operational, emotional, legal, and political contours of organizing at work. Scheiber, a New York Times workplace and labor reporter, layers the stories of four primary protagonists onto analyses of the U.S. labor movement, changes in university education, and the shifting life trajectories and political commitments of many working Americans under the age of forty.

Mutiny showcases Scheiber’s ability to illustrate the lives of his subjects. While the author draws on wide-ranging interviews and research, the book is structured around the workplace organizing experiences of Teddy (the Chicago barista), Chaya (an Apple Store employee in Maryland), Andrés (a video game tester in Texas), and Sydney (a unionized television writer). They form a diverse cohort in terms of race, gender, and life experience.

In addition to extensive personal interviews, Scheiber offers lucid and revealing corporate histories of firms like Starbucks and Apple and what he calls their “counterinsurgency” campaigns against recent organizing drives. We see the nuts and bolts of union campaigns: navigating relationships with previously friendly shift managers; balancing between different personalities, identities, and priorities among workers in the nascent organizing committees. The book is a useful resource for people interested in service-sector labor organizing and establishes context for growing political radicalism among younger college-educated Americans. At the same time, however, it doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of its subtitle.

Mutiny is an effective and sympathetic portrayal of the lives and organizing efforts of college-educated workers in middle-value retail and creative workplaces. Scheiber doesn’t do enough, though, to situate those stories within broader changes in the U.S. economy, namely the growth of the medical and educational sectors and the increasing proletarianization of white-collar work. While the retail, food service, and creative workers featured in the book are engaged in crucial organizing, they only represent a minority of college graduates employed in waged labor. If we are interested in the question of how trends in higher education and class structure have reshaped U.S. politics, we need a broader focus that highlights workers in the most dynamic sectors of employment growth.

Who Are College-Educated Workers?

Scheiber’s overall argument is indisputable: younger, college-educated workers increasingly identify with the political left, support unions, and face both college debt and high costs of living. College graduates in their twenties and thirties find it harder to achieve the middle-class security that degrees were supposed to provide.

But Mutiny misses some tectonic changes in the occupational and educational composition of the American workforce. Chris Maisano has highlighted these key trends, most notably the growth in white-collar and semi-professional employment over recent years.[2] More than one in three employed Americans now work in “professional, scientific, and technical services,” “educational services,” “healthcare and social assistance,” or public sector posts. More than 60 percent of Americans 18 and older have had at least some form of post-secondary education, and 43 percent of American adults aged 25-39 have earned at least a bachelor’s degree. In the key growth sectors for U.S. employment, education and healthcare, most workers have at least a bachelor’s degree.[3]

These figures should not undercut the importance of organizing in retail and food service, much less in manufacturing and transportation. These are major sectors of the economy and feature both serious exploitation and serious organizing. Service-sector organizing struggles, in the face of intense union-busting, have inspired solidarity and influenced workers across the country. Workers and organizers need to continue ramping up the speed, creativity, and worker leadership of union efforts across the board. But if the object of analysis is the “college-educated working class” and its relation to the rise of the post-2008 U.S. left, we need a more complete picture.

While Andrés and Sydney both have college degrees that relate to their work, neither job requires credentialing. And the book’s two primary subjects, Teddy and Chaya, both work service jobs they took as an alternative to “using their degrees.” This is an important phenomenon, but it overlooks the bulk of college-educated workers who earn degrees as credentials for a particular career. While Scheiber cites Paul Mason in identifying the “graduate with no future” as the paradigmatic subject of the global protest movements of the 2010s,[4] we need to grapple with the political potential of graduates whose near-futures are grinding careers in healthcare or education, crunched between debt, family obligations to both parents and children, and high costs of living.

None of Scheiber’s subjects are occupational therapists, special education teachers, registered nurses, or medical technicians. None of them are social workers, mental health counselors, librarians, or non-profit workers. There is brief mention of graduate students and adjunct professors, but they don’t feature among the core characters. Yet these are the occupations — along with lower-level positions in sales, tech, and office administration — where we can find most of the college-educated workers that Mutiny’s subtitle identifies as agents of historical change.

Sometimes described as “sociocultural (semi-)professionals,” these workers are, in many cases, tasked with caring for and educating the population.[5] Their workplace credentialing usually requires college education and occasionally graduate degrees. They occupy contradictory class positions. On the one hand, they live by selling their labor rather than owning income-generating assets, and they are not usually tasked with supervising other workers. In some areas, they are highly unionized. Conversely, they often enjoy greater workplace autonomy than workers in retail, production, or transportation, and their jobs generally support the reproduction of social relations rather than the production of goods and services for direct profit.

Nurses, teachers, and non-tenured academic workers have been a hotbed of union organizing and have pulled off some of the most daring and high-profile strikes of the past decade and a half. Their stories, and the broader rise of the “meds and eds” economy, needs to be a core element in any analysis of the rise and revolt of college-educated workers.

Mutiny’s focus on a particular subset of the college-educated workforce conveys a partially true narrative that is quite attractive to your average New York Times reader: the college system is broken, your kids are getting liberal arts or humanities degrees that don’t match the economic opportunities available in a twenty-first century economy, and as a result are stuck in dead-end service jobs. To his credit, Scheiber points to a dysfunctional economy as the real culprit, and then spotlights the hard work, dedication, and creativity that these college-educated workers draw upon to organize their workplaces. But his concentration on liberal arts graduates working service-sector jobs leaves the bigger story out of frame.

The Proletarianization of the Professions

Today, people working in what had been solidly professional occupations are facing disintegrating employment regimes. Traditionally, most U.S. doctors, lawyers, and professors had high levels of workplace autonomy. They either owned the firms in which they worked, were on track towards partner ownership, or in the case of tenured academics, exercised “shared governance” of higher education institutions. Professional careers meant some combination of generous compensation, business ownership, and lack of supervision.

The employment landscape for these professionals has changed drastically in recent decades. In the 1980s, about 80 percent of U.S. physicians worked in private practices they either owned individually or with a small group of partner doctors. Today, just 42 percent are working in private practices of any size. Half of U.S. doctors are now employed in hospital settings, which have themselves undergone dramatic changes.[6] In the 1970s, around 90 percent American hospitals were independent, but after decades of both horizontal and vertical consolidation, that number has plummeted to roughly 30 percent. 90 percent of all metropolitan areas in the U.S. now have hospital markets considered to be “highly concentrated” in the hands of major health systems.[7]

While U.S. physicians are certainly well compensated, their employment structures have undergone what can fairly be described as a process of increasing proletarianization. More doctors are now hired employees than firm-owning partners, their workplaces feature larger concentrations of labor, and intensifying supervision from hospital management has degraded workplace autonomy. Partner-doctors tend to respond to organized nurses or techs from the hostile perspective of a business owner. But employee-doctors have much greater incentive to support the organizing aims of their coworkers. Better patient ratios and less-tired nurses make doctors’ jobs easier rather than threatening their profit margins.

Scheiber quotes a doctor in a Minnesota hospital chain, a member of a recently recognized union of 500 doctors, who likens her corporate supervision and quota regime to the logic of Taylorist factory management.[8] However, Mutiny leaves this thread mostly unfollowed, failing to stitch it together with the stories of nurses, technicians, clerical workers, and millions of other college-educated medical workers in this country.

Versions of this story have played out across professional occupations, higher education being perhaps the most prominent example. Tenure-track professorships at universities declined steadily from the 1980s, cratering after the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent state-level austerity. But undergraduate enrollments kept rising, so universities turned to adjunct faculty and an expanding roster of Ph.D. candidates to fill the labor gap. This has only further exacerbated the dysfunction of the academic job market: more Ph.Ds. competing for fewer tenure-track positions.

Mutiny does spend a few pages describing organizing among graduate student workers, though it plays a much less prominent role than other stories. That’s unfortunate, because the rise of graduate student unions and increasing militancy among both adjunct and tenure-track faculty has been a major labor story of the past decade.

Even associates at corporate law firms face their own version of these pressures. As historian Dylan Gottlieb shows in his new book Yuppies and his recent articles, the explosion of employment in New York City law firms and financial institutions during the 1980s and 1990s transformed working conditions for the young college graduates toiling in file cabinets and copy rooms.[9] As the ratio of junior associates to partners ballooned, an associate position at a law firm no longer meant a clear path to partnership. Instead, debt-saddled law school grads took well-paid but ultimately dead-end jobs featuring 60-hour weeks of routine clerical tasks.

Professional fields have been revolutionized through the increased separation of practitioners from ownership and management of their workplaces. The resulting corporate consolidation, imbalances between entry-level and partner opportunities, diminished work autonomy, and increased labor discipline have changed the meaning of professional work in the United States.

High-earning professionals in law or finance will likely not form the social base of a left-wing political movement. Many of them still own their own firms, and they are almost all significant asset owners, either in the form of primary real estate, secondary properties, or financial assets. Many make their money by directly serving the interests of capital. But the U.S. left can appeal to the potentially less hostile sets of professionals via a program of expanded social services—like healthcare, education, and childcare—that they, together with working people outside the professions, would benefit from. We need to understand how the changing nature of professional employment reverberates throughout the middle and lower rungs of the professionals and semi-professionals that do have major political potential.

Skilled Workers in Class Struggle

The absorption of formerly well-paid artisans, skilled workers, and semi-professionals into expanding capitalist labor regimes is hardly new. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, technological and economic changes forced generations of relatively skilled workers to contend with the realities of deskilling and proletarianization. Having lost their ownership of small workshops and the autonomy of artisanal production, they found themselves integrated as relatively privileged and skilled workers within mass-production facilities. And just like the sociocultural semi-professionals of today, these workers often formed the vanguard of labor and socialist movements.

In the earliest wave of nineteenth-century industrialization, the “mule spinners” of the massive cotton mills in both England and the U.S. were key drivers of labor struggle. Far from being the most oppressed, these mule spinners were at the top of the labor hierarchy within what the poet William Blake called the “dark satanic mills.” Recruited from the disintegrating ranks of artisanal producers, they were tasked with overseeing the operation of the technologically complex “spinning mules” and were the highest-paid and most specialized workers in the factory. They also led major strikes throughout the cotton industrial era, oftentimes explicitly in solidarity with more oppressed and less skilled workers, especially women and children mill workers.[10]

The experience of the late labor thinker and organizer Mike Parker sheds light on the continuities of this dynamic 150 years after the heyday of the mule spinners.[11] Parker was active in the campus New Left and, along with his comrades in the International Socialists, participated in a “turn to industry” in the 1970s.  Recently graduated activists took jobs in key industries like transportation, auto manufacturing, telecommunications, and to a lesser extent education, with the goals of capitalizing on shopfloor militancy and implanting deeper roots for the socialist movement in the organized working class.[12] While the rank-and-file upsurges of the late 1960s and early 1970s petered out, this political tendency founded enduring organizations like Labor Notes and Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Parker himself worked for decades in Michigan auto plants, but as a skilled electrician rather than an assembly line worker. Because of skilled tradespeople’s ability to interact with workers, management, and machines at different points in the production process, they gained an advantage in understanding the production process in a more holistic fashion. And just like the cotton mule spinners, they could leverage their highly skilled positions to take risks that production-line workers might be more hesitant to take.

This relatively privileged position within an industrial workplace could lead to a craft mentality, in which those relatively skilled workers protect their own positions at the expense of less skilled positions. But if infused with the logics of industrial unionism and working-class solidarity, skilled workers embedded in mass-production workplaces have always held explosive potential as leaders of working-class activity.

These proletarianizing skilled workers have historically found themselves at the front lines of working-class movements for a complex set of reasons. The logics and values of professionalism and artisanal production—autonomy and control over work time and processes, pride in skill, etc.—combust when they encounter factory discipline. These workers also tend to have greater educational attainment (either academic or trade) and, sometimes, more extensively developed experiences in formal politics. Moreover, they tend to have a clearer view of the production process in its totality while simultaneously being shut out of ownership opportunities.

The post-industrial nature of the U.S. economy means that artisan weavers or electricians are no longer being drafted into the rank-and-file of mass production factory workers. But the medical, educational, and social service fields are swelling with tens of millions of workers. Most of those workers hold college degrees and have the already partially realized potential to take leadership in working-class movements. If they can carry forward the ethos of industrial unionism, democracy, and solidarity demanded by Mike Parker and his antecedents, they can be a force to be reckoned with.

College graduates in service sector jobs, like the protagonists of Mutiny, have forged their own impressive bonds of solidarity and deserve to be studied, supported, and listened to. But the book’s focus on workers for whom the modern capitalist system of college education and career tracking has not “worked the way it was supposed to” misses the core grievances and collective power of those whose educations have placed them on the “correct” career trajectory in growing employment sectors.

These skilled semi-professionals embedded in large workplaces have deep structural potential and a historical legacy of struggle. Nurses and their unions have the structural power to improve conditions in massive hospitals for doctors, technicians, aides, custodial staff, and patients alike. Teachers and their unions have similar capacity to leverage their position to improve the educational system for the other semi-skilled and unskilled workers at their schools, not to mention the learning conditions of students.

The Social Bases of Progressive Politics in the Twenty-First Century

Teachers, MRI technicians, public defenders, nurses, therapists, and social workers can and should be a core constituency for majoritarian left politics in post-industrial societies. Progressive political movements should continue to lean into our commitments to massive state investments in the education and health sectors and continue building connections with organized workers in those sectors.

While the unionization of these semi-professionals is quite advanced in certain regions, supporting organizing efforts across the country is one of the crucial tasks of a left that needs to firmly ground itself in a key and growing social base. Such an orientation, far from ignoring or alienating workers in the retail, food service, and manufacturing sectors, provides a viable path to building the solidarity and political capacity needed to transform the balance of class forces in U.S. society. Classes are not given or static; they are transformed through changing economic and social relations, and their political manifestations are built and articulated through common struggle. We must observe the tangible changes in class structure and derive political strategy based on our observations and our analysis of their potential.

The existing social base driving the sustained growth of the U.S. left and increased labor militancy for the past decade has been precisely in sociocultural semi-professionals. A significant number of them have been drawn towards socialist and progressive politics because of the conjuncture of longer-term trends in employment and education and the more contingent political upheavals of the 2010s. Mutiny does a good job interlacing broader stories of political change, especially the election of Donald Trump, the rise of Bernie Sanders, and the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) with his primary narratives. Curiously, given Noam Scheiber’s previous book Escape Artist: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, the Obama administration itself receives very little play in his current book. The story of the radicalization of young former liberals in the 2010s, which fueled Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Sanders campaigns, and the rebirth of DSA, is fundamentally incomplete without an account of the Obama presidency.

Indeed, the one-two punch of raised expectations and dashed hopes that characterized young liberals’ experience of the Obama project mirrored their experience with university education. Just as college life and Obama’s candidacy had raised their expectations and “taught them to think and question” their lives and the world around them, the realities of neoliberal technocracy, recession and austerity, and the world of underpaid post-college employment “scrambled their instincts and ate at their dignity.”[13]

Political-economic changes are not destiny. It is up to unionists in that cohort to help organize those workplaces and build common cause with other segments of the working class. One of labor’s crucial tasks in the coming decade needs to be expanding its presence into the types of retail, food service, and delivery workplaces featured in Mutiny. And college-educated workers on those shop floors can be an important resource. But most college-educated workers are funneled into the growing health, education, and social service sectors. The labor movement and political left can put themselves in the best position to grow by expanding their political influence and shop floor organization among workers in those industries.

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[1] Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026, p. 50.

[2] Chris Maisano, “Is This Really the ‘Age of Class Dealignment?’” Jacobin, March 3, 2025.

[3] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment by Major Industry Sector.” August 28, 2025. U.S. Census Bureau, “Census Bureau Releases New Educational Attainment Data,” September 3, 2025.

[4] Scheiber, Mutiny, 295.

[5] For a detailed description of this occupational group, see Daniel Oesch, “Coming to Grips with a Changing Class Structure: An Analysis of Employment Stratification in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland,” International Sociology, 2006, Vol. 21 (2), pp. 263-288.

[6] Georgia Garvey, “Smaller Share of Doctors in Private Practice Than Ever Before,” American Medical Association News Wire, June 24, 2025.

[7] Andrew Patman and Manali Neeck, “Health Care Provider Consolidation,” Bipartisan Policy Center, January 29, 2026.

[8] Scheiber, Mutiny, 219.

[9] Dylan Gottlieb, Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York. Harvard University Press, 2026; Dylan Gottlieb, “White Collar Sweatshops,” Aeon, April 9, 2026.

[10] Katie Belshaw, “Cotton Strikers, Picketers, and Peterloo,” People’s History Museum, April 30, 2019.

[11] Gay Semel, “Mike Parker, a Life Well-Lived on the Left,” Jacobin, January 27, 2022.

[12] Andrew Stone Higgins, From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists, Haymarket Books, 2026.

[13] Scheiber, Mutiny, 10.

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