Frothing Mad

Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class by Noam Scheiber. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pages. 2026.

For the past half-century, organized labor’s decline has looked less like a political struggle and more an inevitability. Deindustrialization, a new wave of globalization, and a legal regime redesigned to favor employers hollowed out the labor movement so thoroughly that unions came to seem a relic, an institution ill-suited to the modern economy. And yet, in recent years, workplace organizing has surged. Union election petitions filed with the National Labor Relations Board doubled between 2021 and 2024; the restaurant industry, notoriously difficult to organize, jumped to the top of the filings list. New infrastructure emerged to support this activity, from volunteer-run projects like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee to independent unions at Trader Joe’s, REI, and stores.

Many of these efforts have been led by young people, which is not an obvious development. Their parents’ generation, facing its own economic shocks, certainly didn’t generate an organizing wave on a similar level. The millennials and zoomers that walked out of Starbucks stores and organized graduate student unions were generally not the children of steelworkers, steeped in labor tradition; a large number had likely never met a union member before becoming one.

In Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, Noam Scheiber identifies a combination of structural and psychological factors that explain younger generations’ transformation into the central players of a resurgent labor movement. Young people have graduated with unprecedented levels of student debt into labor markets hollowed out by the Great Recession and Covid-19, forcing them into low-skilled hospitality and retail jobs. The Starbucks baristas, Apple store workers, video game designers, and screenwriters in Mutiny were taught from an early age that there was no pathway to success that didn’t start with their education. Duped by the fantasy of meritocracy, they fulfilled their end of the bargain—many of the principal characters that Scheiber follows were elite students—but found their liberal arts degrees only good for frothing milk. This quasi-humiliation drove many of them to organize their workplaces.

Scheiber surveys multiple pathways to millennial stagnation, but the two most prominent stories revolve around Starbucks and Apple. This is no coincidence. Scheiber’s argument about disillusionment requires a specific kind of employer, one that needed to attract employees with the je ne sais quoi that the average McDonald’s burger flipper might lack, and they promulgated a progressive vision and company culture to do so. For young college graduates stuck in the service economy, these companies at least offered the sense that even if the job wasn’t what they’d planned, it at least reflected their values and identity.

What Scheiber’s reporting captures is that like so much else in American life, at a vague, undefined point about ten years ago, these jobs got worse. The professed care for each worker’s development was sacrificed at the altar of marginal efficiencies.  At Apple, Steve Jobs’s successor, Tim Cook, was a logistics guy. The average customer only bought a new product every couple of years, but services and apps offered a more regular and lucrative source of revenue. So, instead of teaching customers how to use Apple products to make music or a film, creatives found themselves strong-arming them into purchasing AppleCare+. Starbucks’ embrace of ever-more elaborate drink modifiers and mobile ordering transformed the simple act of making coffee into an increasingly stressful production, even as cuts to staffing and the spread of irregular scheduling made it harder for workers to qualify for the health care and tuition benefits that had set the company apart.

This account feels familiar; the idea that well-educated young people have been radicalized by the material and psychological effects of their economic precarity isn’t exactly new. But what makes Mutiny more than just another portrait of generational precarity is that Scheiber captures the process by which Starbucks “partners” and Apple “creative pros” realized they were just workers, no different from a McDonald’s burger flipper. As one Apple employee put it, “This is where I’ve gaslit myself. This is so fun, I love doing it, I’m just going to do it no matter what.” He continues, “Then I realize, ‘Goddamn, I’m exploiting myself. Shit.’”

Most of the events that Scheiber reports in Mutiny take place during the long “hot labor summer” of 2022 through late 2023, when the Starbucks and Amazon Labor Union (ALU) breakthroughs were met with the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the United Auto Workers (UAW) Stand Up Strike, and a wave of organizing drives across industries. In the 2010s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded about fifteen major new work stoppages per year on average; in 2023 alone, there were thirty-three, involving nearly half a million workers. Scheiber shows that this was met by a genuine shift in public attitudes: after decades of pro-employer sentiment, Americans increasingly sided with labor.

Scheiber’s contribution is to place college-educated workers at the center of this shift, tracing how they made peace with jobs they never planned on because the company’s progressive branding aligned with their sense of self until conditions deteriorated and they came to see themselves in class terms, radicalized not by economic hardship alone but by the betrayal of a meritocratic promise. But there is a tension in this arc. The conclusion reached by these workers depends on a mechanism that is entirely specific to their education and the type of company they work for.

Citing the sociologist Ruth Milkman, Scheiber identifies a certain “class confidence”—know your legal rights, feeling empowered to change your circumstance, having networks to fall back on—that is the product of young workers’ education. It is precisely what distinguishes these workers from the ones they now stand alongside. Scheiber’s treatment of the organizing efforts at Amazon serves as Mutiny’s quiet proof of this tension. Unlike Starbucks and Apple, Amazon never cultivated a progressive image or sought to make its workers feel special. The whole point of Amazon is ruthless efficiency and low prices; it is a necessity, not a luxury. Its workforce is accordingly more diverse, less likely to hold a college degree, and maintains few illusions about what the job was supposed to offer. The coalition that unionized the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island depended on an alliance between these workers and college-educated salts (organizers who take jobs at a company with the explicit aim of unionizing it from within), a dynamic that even Chris Smalls, the polarizing ALU leader, acknowledged: “We need them, especially with the bargaining unit we have. It wasn’t going to just come from workers. But it was led by workers for sure.”

Throughout Mutiny, the ALU functions as a foil, a reminder of what happens when the shared educational background and brand disillusionment that held Starbucks and Apple workers together is absent. The Starbucks campaign spread rapidly after the Buffalo breakthrough in December 2021 because workers at each store shared similar backgrounds. But Scheiber observes that, for the ALU, the JFK8 coalition proved far more idiosyncratic than dynamics at other Amazon warehouses, either because there were no salts or, where there were, they struggled to build commonalities with the average Amazon worker.

Scheiber draws an instructive comparison with the UAW, where a coalition of college-educated and non-college-educated workers actually held together. The union had grown stale and corrupt before Shawn Fain’s election in 2023 brought a radicalizing energy and strategic innovation that manifested in the Stand Up Strike, which in turn produced gains almost unimaginable for autoworkers. Fain’s rise was made possible by Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a reform coalition of graduate-student workers and long-time autoworkers. Given that Fain won his runoff by only around five hundred votes, the graduate students were indispensable, and it is natural, given his focus, that Scheiber’s UAW chapter is focused on their role.

But the autoworkers who make up the vast majority of UAW membership had their own reasons to revolt. They had watched their union’s leadership plead guilty to embezzlement charges, accepted two-tier wage systems that left newer hires earning far less than veterans doing the same work, and seen the Big Three post $250 billion in profits over the previous decade while cost-of-living adjustments remained frozen since 2009.

If the most significant labor moment in a generation is ultimately a story about college graduates discovering they are working class, as Scheiber suggests, then the workers who were already there—the Amazon warehouse workers, the autoworkers who voted for Fain—are flattened into the backdrop of someone else’s awakening. Their militancy was no less central to the long hot labor summer than the youthful radicalization that Scheiber chronicles.

In Mutiny, younger workers’ anger at a fundamentally broken system feels contemporary, but the heady optimism that they can do something about has since collided with the realities of employer opposition, themselves emboldened by the return of President Trump.

Scheiber shows that Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) succeeded when they targeted the company’s reputation. In the summer of 2023, the union went out on strike and compounded the backlash over dozens of store managers’ decision to forbid their employees from putting up Pride flags, but the most consequential action revolved around the company’s bungled PR over the Gaza genocide. On October 9, 2023, the SBWU account tweeted “Solidarity with Palestine!” alongside an image that depicted a bulldozer tearing down a section of the wall encircling Gaza. While union officials deleted the tweet, many customers conflated the union’s post with the company’s position. Starbucks sued the union over the post and allegedly worked with the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce to protest union stores.

Starbucks’ remarkable capacity to simultaneously alienate Zionists and supporters of Palestine led to declining sales and a fall in its share price. Sensing an opportunity, SBWU collaborated with the Strategic Organizing Center to launch a serious challenge for the company’s board seats open for election. This proved sufficient to compel Starbucks to begin negotiations after the company had delayed for over two years after the first Buffalo store successfully organized, and the company extended to union stores the wage increases and benefits it had previously withheld.

This is where Scheiber’s narrative ends, but two years on, the mood among rank-and-file is markedly gloomier. Bargaining broke down in December 2024, and SBWU launched a strike on Red Cup Day—an annual promotion that typically drives significant spikes from customers clamoring to receive their reusable cup—in November 2025 that, compared to its previous actions, struggled to sustain momentum. Some new stores have filed for and won elections, but the vast majority of members quietly returned to work around Christmas. In January 2026, after a concerted recovery effort under a new CEO, Starbucks reported that foot traffic in its stores had returned to growth for the first time since the genocide began, suggesting that the strike had done little to threaten the company’s turnaround effort.

Why has Starbucks become impervious to the reputational pressure that once forced it to the table? Part of the answer is institutional. For all its deep flaws, the Biden administration provided an institutional framework that underpinned the labor surge. Jennifer Abruzzo, Biden’s general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, pursued an agenda that amounted to the most aggressive expansion of worker protections in decades: reviving dormant legal doctrines to compel employer recognition of unions; seeking injunctions against retaliation while organizing drives were still live; and making it materially costlier for companies to break the law. Starbucks came to the table not out of goodwill but because it faced the convergence of institutional and reputational pressure.

Under Trump, that pressure has evaporated. The NLRB has been gutted, and companies like Starbucks now feel emboldened to wait workers out. Scheiber’s emphasis on young people’s expectations gap can explain why these workers radicalized, but it cannot sustain a movement on its own. Many of the baristas who drove the Starbucks campaign are burned out, fired, or have quit. And for all the energy that Mutiny chronicles, union density continued to fall throughout its narrative, dropping to a historic low of 9.9 percent in 2024. The labor movement won more elections, filed more petitions, and enjoyed more public sympathy than at any point in a generation—and it still shrank.

Meanwhile, much of the radicalizing energy that Scheiber documents has not disappeared but dispersed. Some of it has been redirected into opposing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns and defending institutions under threat; some has flowed into Palestine solidarity organizing, which draws on many of the same networks; some has found expression in electoral projects like Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. These are not failures of political consciousness, they are evidence that the generation Scheiber describes did, in fact, wake up. But they are also evidence that workplace organizing was one channel among many for a broader radicalization, and perhaps a more contingent one than Mutiny allows. Whether the labor movement can convert that awakening into durable power may depend less on the expectations of college graduates than on building the institutional infrastructure that outlasts any single awakening.