"A Kind of General Ecumenical Worker Consciousness"

Our interview today is with Noam Scheiber — a workplace and labor reporter for The New York Times. We basically wanted to talk to him about this idea:

Noam wrote a book on this. It’s called Mutiny and is a “vivid portrait of this new working class while telling the dramatic story of its revolt against the status quo.” We were very excited to speak with him about the broad rise of a worker identity, the repercussions of our “national college obsession”, what private equity has to do with doctors unionizing, and how advances in tech are changing workers’ self-image.

For background reading, we recommend two interviews from our Debt Issue. One, our interview with Thomas Gokey of the Debt Collective from 2020 and our interview with Julia Barnard on the inherently predatory nature of student loans.

This interview was conducted by Noelle Forougi for franknews, and condensed for clarity. Help keep franknews free and for the public by subscribing below.

I’m want to start by hearing a little bit more about how you came to your book — which is great, by the way.

Yeah, so I’ve been at the New York Times for about 11 years now, covering labor and workplace issues. In the summer of 2021, I got an email from an organizer I work with on other stories, saying he had put together a group of folks at Starbucks in Buffalo, and though people had tried and failed to organize Starbucks before, they felt bullish.

I wrote an initial story about them filing for union elections at three locations in Buffalo, and they ended up winning two of those three elections, and the campaign went on to sort of blow up nationally. After they won the first two elections, they filed for another half a dozen or so elections in January, another dozen in February, and in March 60-something stores filed for union elections. By the summer there were hundreds.

As it spread across the country, I would reach out to folks who were trying to organize their stores, ask why they wanted to do this, and in a majority of cases, the person on the other end of the phone call was a college graduate, they had a lot of debt, they had not intended to continue working at Starbucks after graduating, but somehow they had ended up there because their other professional plans had just fallen through.

It started to feel like there was something deeper going on, demographically, economically. I wrote a piece in January of ‘22 about this. And then, as the winter turned to spring and summer, it got even broader than Starbucks. People were filing for elections at Apple and REI and Trader Joe’s, and it became clear that there was something really undergirding this that had to do with economics and sociology and demographics. So I wrote another piece in April that was the first time I used the term “college-educated working class,” because it seemed like there were things that were consistent across these organizing campaigns, and that had to do with sort of downward mobility after graduating from college.

What did you find about the college-educated working class on a whole?

This is obviously a little neater than reality — but, generally, the generation of people who graduated from college after the Great Recession, were given the hardest sell of any generation in American history about why they needed to go to college. Everyone from their friends, to family members, to the president of the United States was pushing it. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, would talk about how college was no longer a luxury, but a necessity. KIPP, this large charter school network, embraced this mantra of “college begins in kindergarten.” This became a national obsession — everyone has to start thinking about college from the moment they walk into a classroom.

And then more of them than ever did go to college, but they did so precisely the moment when the return on a college degree was flatlining. There was a huge gap between the expectations they entered college with and the reality they found when they graduated.

I’ve tried to come at it from different angles, one of which is pure economics. There’s an economist I cite in the book, Jesse Rothstein, at Berkeley, who looks at employment rates for young college grads relative to older college grads and finds it actually starts to get a little soft in 2003, 2004, even before the Great Recession, but then really nosedives after the recession, and, a decade later, has not fully recovered. And then, of course, the pandemic hits and upends everything all over again. We see obviously rising student debt, we see the difficulty of owning a home. The National Association of Realtors has a statistic about the age of first home ownership. I think the last reading it hit 40 for the first time in history. The trends just get worse and worse.

It does feel like there’s such vitriol when talking about a college-educated working class person or group of people. Do you find that?

I think there’s a general sense that they’re sort of entitled, that they screwed up their opportunity. I think that’s a big part of it. We saw that in some response to the union campaigns. We also saw it in response to Biden’s college debt relief. Like, “You went to college, you ran up this debt, I didn’t get to go to college. Why should I bail you out?”

But one of the things I try to write about is this kind of general ecumenical worker consciousness. People’s identity used to be tied up in what they did or where they worked, but now there’s just a broader worker consciousness. I think people’s reflex now is to now side with the workers who are taking on a company, no matter how coddled.

One place you’ve historically seen that play out is people’s attitude toward Hollywood unions. In 2007 - 2008 when the writers went on strike there was a lot of feelings of these “coddled writers” going on strike. But when the writers and actors went on strike again more recently, the general public was incredibly supportive. Gallup did polling in August of 2023 and there was over 70% support for writers rather than the studio.

Your report on this shift in worker identity, particularly in doctors, which I found really interesting ….

Doctors are really good examples of this. We’ve seen pretty aggressive consolidation in the healthcare space. It starts in the ‘80s and ‘90s, accelerates in the early 2000s, and really accelerates after Obamacare. The Obama administration’s mission was to make the healthcare system more efficient, and they succeeded in a lot of ways, both through the initial Obamacare legislation and through a variety of regulations after it passed. But the upshot of a lot of the regulations was to foist more risk onto hospitals and hospital systems. If someone gets treated at a hospital and then has to go back for the same condition, the government will now claw back some of the reimbursement for the hospital. Part of your income is dependent on how well you do your job.

The healthcare industry responded by ramping up consolidation. The thinking was that if you’re a single hospital and suddenly you’re not getting great results and the government claws back money, it may well wipe you out; but if you’re a huge hospital system with a dozen or several dozen hospitals, you’re probably diversified enough that you’ll survive even if one or two hospitals are underperforming.

This really alienates doctors and other healthcare providers. They now feel like they’re working inside these huge conglomerates. They’re told what to do that by MBAs who run these huge systems. They’re told how much time they can spend with a patient, what they should ask, how long they can keep people in the hospital – all these checklists, incentivized to hit certain metrics. And they fucking hate that. Doctors now feel themselves to be cogs in an industrial machine in a way they didn’t used to and it has started to prompt organizing. When I talked to those folks, it was very much “they treat us like factory workers, they could give a shit about our professional judgment or expertise, they just want us moving people in and moving people out, and hitting our metrics.” That’s been a huge driver of both general angst and the sort of worker identity I’ve been talking about ….

What role do you think AI will play in that?

I think AI is really heightening this shared worker identity. You see it most clearly with people in tech, software developers. These are folks, software developers, who very much saw themselves as professionals, management-adjacent, or even owners, because you tend to get stock or stock options at a tech company, now have developed a worker consciousness. I wrote a piece in December specifically about this. AI has changed their self-image. They now see themselves as precarious, very much at odds with management, involved in this very traditional management-labor dichotomy.

Do you think the trends of going to college will actually change?

I think it’s entirely possible we’ll see that shift now, both because there’s a sense of frustration on the left that college is like a bait and switch, the promises made didn’t come to fruition. And on the right, there is a real cynicism about the ideological project of higher education, the sense that the whole mission is to brainwash people and feed them wokeness and political correctness.

I feel like — I have no data on this – but culturally I feel like I’ve been seeing more and more of a push of young people toward trades, which are obviously great jobs, but I feel like it’s missing the piece of why they’re great jobs. Which is not because there is something inherently better about them, but largely because most of them are unionized.

Yep — unionized, not automatable. It is interesting, it’s a little hard to quantify at this point, but I’d see this periodically in the Starbucks I write about in the book, on the North Side of Chicago, one of the workers ended up going to trade school and apprenticing as a pipefitter or something, and everyone was like, “Wow, that was a really good idea.” So you do see this conversation — even among my peers, upper-middle-class people who have kids in college or just graduating, who are alarmed by their lack of job prospects — there’s this conversation that starts out half-joking or half-serious, “maybe the trades are a way to go.” So I think that’s right, and it’s interesting because the quality of these jobs is directly associated with union density in these industries

Yeah, I feel like there’s a fetish for blue-collar work in America, for this version of American dynamism and a blue-collar worker and a good job….

I think that’s absolutely the case. One of the things I hope to accomplish with the book, and in talking about it, is just to underscore how that image of the traditional working-class person is outdated. Part of it was offshoring and automation, but just because someone doesn’t work in a plant, and may have a college degree, doesn’t mean they’re not working class. The traditional shorthand for working class is college degree or not, and my feeling is that’s pretty outdated, in the same way that the blue-collar factory worker as the be-all and end-all of the working-class person is also outdated.