Noam Scheiber > Quotes

“Ruth Milkman, the sociologist, noted that the college-educated tend to know their legal rights. They feel empowered to change their personal circumstances, even to influence current events. They have networks of friends and classmates and former professors who are in a position to help them. They assume there’s another job out there if the current one doesn’t work out. They have a “broader worldview that encompasses more than getting through the day,” Milkman told The New York Times.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“It was not lost on Microsoft executives that staying neutral in a union election could help signal its good intentions to the labor-friendly Biden administration at a time when Biden’s antitrust enforcers were closely scrutinizing the acquisition.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“And it was partly because the salts who did arrive at other warehouses often didn’t have much in common with their coworkers, or struggled to develop a relationship with them.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“Whatever the case, the rise of the mini-room effectively shifted financial risk away from the employer and onto the worker—in some respects what companies like Starbucks did when they guaranteed employees fewer hours and subjected them to more volatile schedules. It reflected an economy-wide mandate from investors and executives to spend no more for labor than was absolutely necessary.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“The student organizers whom Rhoades and Rhoads interviewed vented about their universities’ preoccupation with amassing capital from wealthy donors to fund commercially lucrative research, while cutting back on tenured faculty and putting low-paid graduate students, adjuncts, and instructors “in charge of the dirty work, the business of the classroom.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“Like members of any group, especially one that rocketed to worldwide fame overnight, the organizers were prone to jealousies and rivalries. But the fissures around class and race were especially fraught.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“But for many in this generation, which grew up at the height of American dominance, the concern was that we had too much power.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“In retrospect, the JFK8 coalition had depended heavily on Smalls, whose personal charisma and credibility served as the glue that held together the workers and activists—the stiffs and the salts.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“The union would not even reveal its bargaining demands to its own members. Officially, this was to give the two sides room to make tough trade-offs, free of second-guessing from onlookers. Unofficially, it saved the companies from public shaming by the union and made it hard for union members to blame their leaders for a lousy deal.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“The training was meant both to baptize workers into the Apple way and to teach them to be missionaries in their own right.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“Jobs approved generous benefits like health insurance on the theory that any employee who felt second-class would likely make a customer feel second- class, too.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“He loved to tell romantic stories about business,” said Jeremy Repanich, a Sonics employee when Schultz owned the franchise. “But once you have to get into the nitty-gritty of it, it doesn’t work and he gets frustrated.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

“For decades, salts were mostly working-class people motivated by leftist ideology—Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists. They would take jobs as autoworkers and truck drivers, cultivate reputations as hard workers and faithful comrades, and then discreetly educate coworkers about the power of collective action.”
― Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class