Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

by Noam Scheiber

The story of a disillusioned generation that set out to reclaim its dignity and take on corporate America.

In recent years, young college grads have faced an alarming crushing debt, unemployment, and jobs below their qualifications. They are frustrated that the time and money they invested in a degree have failed to bring about the opportunities they were promised.

The anger of this college-educated working class began to boil over during the Covid pandemic, when workers at companies like Apple and Starbucks shocked corporate America by voting to unionize. Not long after, the veteran New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber met Chaya Barrett, an astute college grad and eight-year Apple employee who had helped organize her coworkers at an Apple store near Baltimore.

While following Barrett and her cohort as their seemingly spontaneous rebellions spread far and wide—from college-educated workers at Apple stores and Starbucks cafés, through video-game studios, and even to Hollywood writers’ rooms—Scheiber realized he was witnessing something deep and lasting. Mutiny is the revelatory account of a generation made confident by their historic educational achievements, only to become disillusioned when their degrees yielded far less than they were taught to expect.

With striking empathy, Scheiber paints a vivid portrait of this new working class while telling the dramatic story of its revolt against the status quo. He describes how recent developments like the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the war in Gaza have further fueled its discontent, and he explains why the college-educated working class will continue to demand change in the workplace, in cities like New York, and in national politics for years to come.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Labor, History, American, Adult

384 pages, Hardcover

Published April 7, 2026

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Interesting, well-written book about young college grads struggling to find jobs in their disciplines and instead working at places like Starbucks and the Apple store. What I appreciated most about this book was how Noam Scheiber thoughtfully portrayed the stories and interviews of these folks. It was moving and compelling to read about what they expected to get from a college degree and then the economic hardship they faced afterward. It was intriguing too to read their unionizing efforts.

I wanted more from this book in terms of how we got here though, to this issue of young college graduates struggling to get jobs in their fields. Scheiber mentions trends like the alarming proliferation of AI use and companies using AI and then laying off workers; he also writes about different political factions’ receptivity to unions. But I desired a bit more analysis about the deeper roots behind why college educated folks are struggling to find relevant jobs. I think it also would’ve been relevant to know more about Scheiber’s positionality, though maybe that’s more of a research methods-based wish than a journalistic one. Anyway, rounding up to four stars because this was a pleasant read on the sentence-level and I felt Scheiber took his interviewees’ lives seriously.

[David Dayen]

This won't let me rate it because it's pre-publication but I'll give it a 4 out of 5. The phenomenon the book describes is real: over-educated people in traditionally exploited jobs, living in an economy that doesn't work for them, and radicalized by the experience enough to fight. I sort of wish it explored that aspect of how we got here, but the book was more interested in close-up reporting of the labor struggles of people at Starbucks, Apple stores, universities, writer's rooms, etc. And it works on those terms.

[Chris Boutté · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great book, but I feel like the title and the way it was marketed are extremely misleading. I give pretty much every good book 5 stars, but I’m giving this one three. Why? Well, reading that title, you’d think there’d be a focus on the college-educated working class. It’s right there in the title. Overall, this book barely touches on any of the people being college educated.

I’m a millennial, and we were sold the idea that if you go to college, rack up 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, you’d get a good job that would not only pay off your loans, but you’d live the American dream. More and more people are discovering that’s far from the truth. I thought this book would focus on that, but it’s not even close to touching on that topic.

Again, this is a great book, but it’s about workers unionizing. It’s extremely well-written, and I learned a lot, but it just felt like it was a bait and switch. The book focuses on companies like Amazon, Apple, and Starbucks, and some people who worked on the unionizing efforts. It also has some focus on the Writers’ Guild union strikes that happened in recent years.

It’s an awesome book about how these huge companies screw their employees, but it has little to nothing to do with the massive issues with getting a college degree in recent years. I have to give this book 3 stars.

[Gabi Gomes · Rating 2 out of 5]

I listened to Noam Scheiber talk on the NYT podcast about the rise of economic populism among the college-educated and thought he was eloquent and well-researched, so I started listening to this audiobook because I thought it was going to be more of that and get deeper into the history. It wasn’t. It’s almost entirely anecdotal and focuses much more on efforts of general unionization at large companies and some college grads dealing with it. I appreciate how seriously he takes the stories but circumstantial evidence isn’t enough to keep me engaged.

Unfortunately, the title is misleading, and I think he has the capacity to write something like that, but this was not what I hoped it would be.

[Maddie Cuckow · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh, this book was ok. I guess I went into it thinking it would be different than what it was. Especially as someone who works in the higher education industry, I was hoping it would speak to the economy and why people aren’t getting jobs with degrees, and ultimately what was preventing that. Mostly, the book focused on corporate greed and the resulting unions that spawned from that (I.e. Apple and Starbucks). I think it was cool to hear about, but definitely not why I picked up the book in the first place. For a while there I was just kinda bored.

[Muriel Unseth · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title is misleading- this is about labor movements (the UAW, Apple, Starbucks, Amazon) around 2020. If you're looking for a largely anecdotal history of this concentrated movement in this particular period, great. I was looking for an analysis of the rise and revolt of the college-educated working class 🤷‍♀️

[Rachael Dockery · Rating 4 out of 5]

While interesting and well-written, this book is much more of a survey of interesting anecdotes than it is a socio-economic analysis of the conditions and factors that gave rise to those disparate yet seemingly related situations.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scheiber has a really weird tone in this, mainly in that he seems incredulous that college graduates aren't able to get better jobs than say working at Starbucks, and that they're choosing to unionize their workplaces. Well surprise dude, the economy fucking sucks, and we're all getting taken advantage of, may as well group up and try to protect yourselves from exploitation that way. We get pictures of various college graduates and the workplaces they end up trying to unionize, and where they're at in the process. He also focuses in on the unionized Starbucks that's about a half mile away from me and the various ways the company has tried to fuck with it in the last half decade or so. Recommended read.

[Robby Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book, but not what I thought it'd be based on the title. I was expecting to hear more about different movements folks with college degrees are involved in. Rather, this is a snapshot in time of the early 2020's looking at several different labor movements such as Starbucks, Apple, Amazon, and UAW. The book does detail how college students/grads who are largely under employed and/or underpaid are the change makers behind these movements. Anyone who would like to hear about the labor movement in the early 2020's would enjoy this book.

[Sue Chen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm 🤔

[Ale · Rating 1 out of 5]

Por fin!!!!!!!!!

[Annalee Drumm · Rating 5 out of 5]

So interesting, so well written, a great overview of democratic socialism in both a historic and modern lens. One of the best pieces I’ve read about the importance of socialism in the current political milieu. Honestly made me feel optimistic which is in stark contrast with most books like this which tend to send me into a doom spiral.

[Mike Gormley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes by topic
The new educated precariat
• Pew polling cited in the book found that the share of college graduates with a positive view of socialism nearly doubled during the 2010s to almost 40%.
• The book argues that radicalization moved up the income ladder: it increasingly included white-collar workers worried about working conditions, job security, and automation.
• By 2022, the jobless rate for this group rose above the national unemployment rate and stayed there into Trump’s second term—the longest such period since the government began tracking the data in the 1980s.

The broken college bargain
• Wage growth for the typical college graduate slowed in the 2000s, even before the Great Recession; for male college graduates, wage growth was essentially flat from the early 2000s to the early 2020s after decades of expansion.
• The employment rate for young college graduates experienced what researchers called a “dramatic structural break” beginning with cohorts entering the labour market around 2005.
• New York Fed research cited in the book defines a good-paying non-degree job as paying more than $45,000 a year and a low-wage job as paying less than $25,000; the share of graduates in the former category collapsed around 2003 and did not recover.
• Degree outcomes have become sharply stratified: selective schools and high-demand fields retain stronger returns, while federal data showed enrolment at nonselective schools grew faster than at selective schools from 2001 to 2020.
• The implication is not that college has ceased to pay on average, but that it has become a far riskier investment when students attend less-selective institutions, choose lower-demand fields, or both.

Debt and underemployment
• Job mismatch—graduates working in occupations where most workers do not hold a degree—reached its highest rate in several decades after the Great Recession.
• The game-industry example captures the debt-to-precarity pipeline: QA testers typically earned only the high teens to low $20s per hour in 2022, often with limited routes into better-paid creative roles.
• One graduate accepted a contract QA role because interest payments were approaching on $70,000 of student debt, showing how debt can remove the ability to wait for a suitable career entry point.

Work as status loss
• The book’s essential claim is that insecurity is experienced as a loss of dignity as much as a loss of income: college graduates expect autonomy and professional recognition but can find themselves subjected to intensive customer-service monitoring and disrespect.
• This status collision helps explain why workers may identify with class politics even when they have degrees, cultural capital, and ambitions traditionally associated with the professional class.
• Organising changes the interpretation of career stagnation: people who initially think they failed individually begin to see a collective pattern of credential oversupply, weak bargaining power, and employer control.

Apple: efficiency and risk transfer
• An Apple Maps team cited in the book had roughly 70 contractors and 10 direct Apple employees in 2016, illustrating a heavily outsourced employment model.
• Apple introduced “triple concurrency” for technical-support advisers in 2015, requiring them to manage three chats at once, compared with the prior expectation of handling one or two customers simultaneously.
• Under tighter retail practices, Geniuses were reportedly limited to 10 minutes to inspect a phone and 15 minutes to inspect a laptop, while also facing pressure to collect upselling-relevant customer information.
• At the Towson store, headcount declined from more than 110 in 2022 to about 80 by late 2023—a reduction of roughly 27%—while the store was expected to maintain operational and sales demands.
• The book uses this decline to argue that Apple shifted from a service- and culture-led retail model toward cost optimisation, sales metrics, lean staffing, temps, and automated training.
• Financial insecurity persisted even within a highly valuable company: one worker withdrew around $1,500 from a 401(k), absorbing a 10% early-withdrawal penalty in addition to taxes, while another sold Apple shares at just under $200 per share to resolve a car repossession.

Hollywood and streaming
• Streaming transformed the duration of TV work: in the 2021–22 season, a typical network writer worked 38 weeks, compared with 24 weeks on a streaming show and just 14 weeks in a mini-room.
• The mini-room model typically kept writers for three to six months; once scripts were completed, most of the six to 12 writers were released, while the showrunner and perhaps one or two others continued through production.
• Under the 2022 WGA contract, a junior writer earned about $4,500 a week and a writer with more than one year of experience about $7,500 a week; crucially, the latter rate could apply whether someone had two years’ experience or 30.
• In 2021, about 25% of showrunners worked at the weekly contractual minimum, up from just 2% in 2013, evidence that precarity had reached even senior creative workers.
• One experienced writer estimated that annual income before the strike was less than half its level seven years earlier.
• The book presents AI as a further intensifier: writers feared work would fragment into occasional freelance “punch-up” assignments on machine-generated scripts rather than stable creative careers.
•
Higher education
• Universities produce a parallel version of credential glut: they admit more graduate students than there are tenure-track positions, creating competition that depresses both present wages and future career prospects.
• By 2021, more than 60% of the relevant academic cohort could not obtain tenure.
• The book notes that PhDs can now take as long as a decade in some cases, partly because faculty manage increasingly large pools of graduate students and postdocs.
• The UAW represented roughly 100,000 higher-education workers, and more than one-third had joined after the 2016 NLRB ruling confirming private-university graduate students’ right to unionise.
• At UMass Amherst, a health-plan change shifted in-network medical costs from no employee payment to about 15% of the cost; for some graduate workers, that represented as much as one-third of annual salary.
• “The campus is Dow Chemical” encapsulates the book’s view that universities increasingly operate like corporations—minimising labour cost and maximising revenue rather than treating teaching and scholarship as public missions.

Labour revival
• In 2023, strikes consumed more than 16 million workdays, the highest total since 2000.
• Public opinion shifted decisively in favour of workers: a Gallup poll before the UAW action found 75% sided with autoworkers, versus 19% with the companies.
• The UAW’s 2023 action was the first strike against all Big Three automakers simultaneously in the union’s 90-year history.
• The book presents the wave as broad-based: Microsoft game workers unionised in January 2023, Ben & Jerry’s workers in Burlington established the chain’s first US unionised location, Star Garden dancers became the first US strippers to unionise in several decades, and Minnesota physicians formed one of the largest private-sector doctor organising groups.
• This is not a restoration of a narrow industrial union movement; it is an expansion across retail, entertainment, technology, academia, professional work, and service-sector jobs.

Generational politics
• Democratic Socialists of America surveys cited in the book found that more than 80% of members had four-year degrees.
• Yet the organisation’s median member age fell from 68 in 2013 to 33 four years later, suggesting a dramatic generational turnover rather than a conventional older-left constituency.
• On Israel-Palestine, a Quinnipiac poll found that Americans aged 18–34 disapproved of Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks by a 20-point margin, while those 35 and older supported it.
• In Michigan’s Democratic primary, more than 13% of Democratic voters chose “uncommitted”; the figure approached 20% in the county surrounding the state’s flagship university.
• The book therefore treats workplace organising and broader political mobilisation as increasingly intertwined, especially for younger workers.

Automation as the next front
• AI is portrayed as making professional labour newly vulnerable, not just manual or routine work.
• A software engineer at Amazon said that in 2025 their team was half the size of the prior year but was still expected to produce the same volume of code using AI tools.
• This creates a plausible next stage of the book’s argument: if automation compresses professional teams and career ladders, political and labour militancy could extend further into knowledge work.

Key takeaways

• The college premium is becoming more conditional. Wage growth for male graduates was flat from the early 2000s through the early 2020s, and the distribution of returns now depends heavily on institution, field of study, and access to scarce professional jobs.
• Credential supply has outrun high-quality job creation. Underemployment and mismatch rose after the Great Recession, while graduates in non-degree roles increasingly shifted from jobs above $45,000 toward work below $25,000.
• Precarity appears across superficially different industries. Apple reduced Towson headcount by about 27%, streaming reduced writing work from 38 to 24 or 14 weeks depending on format, and academia left more than 60% unable to obtain tenure.
• The new labour politics rests on dignity as well as remuneration. Workers react to arbitrary metrics, short contracts, unstable hours, lack of career progression, understaffing, and the gulf between frontline conditions and executive wealth.
• Unions now have unusually broad legitimacy. The 2023 strike total exceeded 16 million workdays, and polling showed a 75%–19% public split in favour of striking autoworkers over companies.
• Young graduates are not uniformly economically centrist. Almost 40% viewed socialism positively in the cited Pew polling, and the DSA membership profile was more than 80% degree-holding with a median age that fell to 33.
• AI may remove the last assumption of professional security. A team halved in size yet expected to maintain output is the book’s clearest numerical illustration of how automation can reshape white-collar bargaining power.

Big-picture themes

The devaluation of credentials
The central structural theme is not that education has no value, but that it no longer reliably purchases a stable middle-class trajectory. The labour market has absorbed an expanding pool of degree holders without creating enough jobs that match their credentials, aspirations, or debt burden.

Risk shifted to workers
The book documents a common employer strategy across sectors: shorten employment commitments and shift volatility onto people. Mini-rooms reduce writers’ work to 14 weeks, Apple replaces permanent staff with more temporary capacity, and graduate workers absorb healthcare costs equivalent in some cases to one-third of yearly income.

Professional-class proletarianisation
The phrase captures the widening gap between cultural status and economic security. Graduates may have sophisticated tastes and professional identities, but increasingly face conditions—unstable income, little control, weak mobility, and replaceability—once associated primarily with lower-wage service or industrial work.

Financialisation over institutions
Apple, streaming studios, and universities are depicted as organisations increasingly governed by optimisation: lower fixed labour costs, tighter staffing, measurable output, and flexible hiring. The result can be an erosion of training, craftsmanship, service quality, and the implicit long-term bargain between institution and worker.

Shared grievance becomes class consciousness
The book’s human arc is from private shame to public explanation. When workers discover that their job insecurity, debt, stalled careers, and status loss are widespread rather than personal failures, collective action becomes more imaginable.

A new political coalition
The potential coalition joins baristas, retail technologists, game workers, writers, graduate employees, doctors, industrial workers, and eventually knowledge workers exposed to AI. Its common denominator is not educational level or occupation, but insecurity amid wealth concentration and reduced individual bargaining power.

[Jake · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this, but it was just too anecdotal

[Peter Palmer]

To be fair I went into this with the wrong expectation. The book looks at covid era/post-covid labor movements at companies like Starbucks and Apple, but watching Scheiber on Breaking Points (where the book first fell on my radar) I was under the impression that it would also be taking a deep dive into what’s going on with the job market for the college educated, but not-yet-established workforce and have a larger scope than just unions on how that job market is being navigated by these grads. For the former the book doesn’t deliver at all, and for the latter it doesn’t deliver in any meaningful way.

The employees/organizers he chose to profile could have come from episodes of Portlandia; it’s fine if someone wants to live off the grid in Vermont, baking sourdough and doing adult drama club, but it’s not convincing that external factors are holding back this person more than internal ones.
The profiles also include a large emphasis on racial/gender identity and sexual orientation. It’s not totally left field, identity politics played a major role in these recent labor movements (the book took for granted that this was a positive), but it often read like something that would have been tapped into social discourse in 2021, but already feels tired and dated a half decade later.

Service industry and retail jobs are shitty. The working environments at Starbucks and Apple described in the book sound pretty standard, if not a bit better for jobs in these industries. Of course being part of a multibillion dollar company gives the Starbucks workers something to go after that baristas at a local cafe can’t.

By the time Mutiny was discussing the UAW it was pretty clear it wasn’t the book I was hoping for, but now knowing that it was looking at the recent history of established labor unions, I was anticipating progressive commentary on the Teamster president speaking at the RNC. Interestingly there was no mention of the teamsters in the whole book and the relationship between the Trump administration and labor unions was an afterthought (literally not discussed until the epilogue).

Overall Mutiny is a snapshot of labor movements at a very specific time. The big picture circumstances that lead to the organizing, and the future of these unions didn’t seem like a real concern for the book.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars, but I'm willing to round up.

This is a book about, well, what the title says. (Well, sometimes it strays into other areas). Scheiber notes how the labor movement has become percolating in unexpected areas, with unexpected people. You have unionization efforts at Starbucks, at Apple, at Amazon, and video game companies, among other places. People are either college educated jobs you wouldn't expect to unionize (the video game workers, for example), or are workers you wouldn't expect to be college-educated (Starbucks, for instance). But there's a rising anger at the economy in general where money flows uphill and opportunity declines for the rest.

Scheiber spends most of his time with the Apple and Starbucks workers, though he goes other places. He spends time noting a new wave of worker agitation in the UAW. That's a little off his focus of college-educated, but he notes how the UAW has actually unionized at universities, and those members proved vital in helping a reformer take the top seat at the UAW table. (That said, it's still off the book's title as the large majority are still traditional union members).

It's mostly a series of stories rather than any in-depth analysis.

I do wonder about some parts of the book. Near the end he gives evidence that the divide between college-educated and non-college educated workers is shriking. Is that just cherrypicking data points (My hunch is yeah, frankly). Some of the cultural issues spurring unionization - such as the Gaza war, surely helped some unionization efforts but also limit the appeal of a broader-based movement. (I really don't think the public as a whole is nearly as upset at Gaza as the average Starbucks worker).

Gotta admit, writing this review is making me re-think if I should give this 5 or 4 stars. But I did appreciate it quite a bit while reading. There are unionization effort popping up in unlikely places and this does a good job cataloguing a lot of them.

[Eitan Levy · Rating 1 out of 5]

In a technical sense, the writer is neutral. He describes the move of young, overeducated people working crappy jobs, toward organized labor. The case he makes for the abuses against them are in the words of the people, with little commentary. He even was pulling the heartstrings of this conservative. Then the little brats decided to make opposing Israel their uniting glue, justifying violence against it and decrying our attempts to win an existential war. This narrative is also not challenged and not questioned but taken and reported at face value. While Schreiber is SUPPOSEDLY neutral, he writes for the anti Israel propaganda outlet the NYT, and we understand his sympathies are with the Palestinianis age against Israel by whom he chooses to interview age quote and who he chooses not to. By default then, he accepts their narrative as definitive of THEIR conflict and also THE conflict around the world about which they clearly know very little and have less sense about. If you're interested in an uncritical hagiography of people working crappy jobs organizing for better wages, perhaps well deserved, enjoy. If you care at all about the other politics, strangely ONLY the conflict involving Israel and no other international issue, you'll be disappointed by the way the narrative is one sided by omission. As an Israeli I care a lot more about not being murdered in my bed than about the wages at Starbucks. So these little cretins coming out of Columbia and Harvard and waxing poetic about the evil Jews can go to hell.

[Michelle Miller · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oof what a disappointment!

I heard a podcast interview with the author, and his points were so interesting and insightful that I had high hopes for this book, but it was almost comically bad. None of the people he follows seemed remotely worth the time, and if they are meant to inspire sympathy for the plight of young workers today, the mission backfired horrendously.

Take the Appe store employees upset at Apple for not giving them THREE MONTHS PAID BEREAVEMENT LEAVE AFTER THE DEATH OF A PET, or the Starbucks employee whose indignation we're apparently supposed to share over the fact Corporate higher-ups won't let him wear an anti-Starbucks t-shirt WHIE ON THE JOB.

Like, WHAT?

Honestly, I left this book seriously empathizing with the likes of Tim Cook and Howard Schultz. if these people represent their rank and file, dear god help us: I don't blame them one bit for investing in replacement robot tech.

What's annoying about all this is that there ARE real problems with the system, and there are all kinds of ways younger generations are being set up to fail, or at the very least stay stuck. Books like this that so passionately miss-pin blame only serve to undermine the conversations that need to be had adn, frankly, make our generation look out-of-touch and helpless and dumb.

[Jonathan Tepper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an advance review copy of this book. It is a great read for anyone interested in the US economy and labor issues.

In Mutiny, Noam Scheiber delivers a gripping and deeply reported account of a generation that did everything it was told (excelled in school, earned degrees, chased opportunity, etc) only to find itself stranded in an economy that couldn’t deliver on its promises. From Starbucks picket lines to Apple Store showrooms, Scheiber traces the lives of young, college-educated workers whose expectations of stability and success collide with the realities of low pay, precarious work, and mounting debt. What emerges is a vivid portrait of a new kind of politically engaged working class.

Blending on-the-ground reporting with sharp analysis, Mutiny captures the emotional and economic forces driving a resurgence of labor activism in unexpected places. With empathy and narrative flair, Scheiber introduces readers to the people at the center of this transformation, revealing how frustration turns into organizing, and how personal disillusionment becomes collective action. Mutiny is an essential look at the shifting meaning of work, class, and power in modern America.

[Shep Searl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was given an advanced copy due to being involved in the process as a worker at the Clark and Ridge Starbucks. As someone directly involved in the work and struggle discussed here, I can say that Noam masterfully articulated the experiences and challenges of the workers and organizers he spent so much time getting to know and highlighting.

This book is snapshot of our time, and a first person witness view into the current labor movement. It highlights the challenges, obstacles, and passions of a generation promised the world and given the scraps. It poses important questions and raises important points regarding the massive gap between the working class (both white and blue-collar) and the wealthy, and discusses how education no longer guarantees stability.

Our generation is building a new standard for labor in real time, a standard which will shape the future of labor and social justice for generations- one way or another. Mutiny gives a glimpse into the world of the people fighting towards this future, and gives a view of both the good and the bad.

This is the new labor movement through-and-through, and it will stand as a snapshot in time as labor justice continues to evolve and shape history.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good reporting here, but--and this is a big but, the marketing for this book and quite frankly the title has very little to do with the book's contents. I was hoping this would be an examination of people from my generation who did what they were told in order to secure a stable and good life (namely, go to college to land a good job and career), and are struggling under the weight of cost of living, stagnating wages, and a failure of our leaders in government to change the status quo--and how that has influenced and propelled people like Zohran Mamdani into power. There is a little bit of that here, and it underscores the beliefs and 'revolt' of a few of the people who are profiled in the book, but Mutiny is mostly about the ways in which employees at companies like Starbucks, Apple, and other smaller creative fields attempted to form a union. The book has a very journalistic quality but little analysis, which I kept waiting for. I'm left feeling like I was sold something different than what I got. 3/5.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent overview of the current labor movement and how it got here. While he does talk about a variety of unions (video games, film and tv writes, autoworkers, Amazon), it's really about two: Starbucks and Apple. These are iconic companies with worshiped former CEOs and diehard fans. He focused on the human side of the story, which isn't a bad thing. I found myself nodding my head at the anxiety Teddy and Chaya endure while trying to better themselves and their coworkers. I do wish this had more analysis instead of simple, yet engaging storytelling (partly because several story beats or character traits are repeated several times). We only get the analysis towards the end, when talking about Gaza, and the overall direction of labor. It will make you groan and shake your head at Starbucks and Apple, and, if you're a college educated person working at these kinds of places, it will make you feel a sense of solidarity.

[Marcel Yap · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean i had no expectations going into this book because it was recommended to me by Atrioc so i just blindly read it lol. Anws i think overall it’s an aite book i almost gave up halfway because to me it got abit boring during the first half about the different people and the starbucks union but it got interesting when they were talking about the writers strike and the apple union etc.
I didn’t really learn much from reading this, it just sorta confirmed my “young people with degrees cannot find a job” idea but it was interesting to see how unions formed and the process of unions getting contracts although im still cloudy on the process but i got a rough idea from this book. it also lays down the harsh reality of forming a union (which i didn’t expect from this book) and how a contract can take a few months to even 2 years.
overall an ok read but i wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t interested in learning more about unions in US

[Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see why people had frustrated reviews of this book. It would be easy to go in with expectations based on the political climate of the country and the title of this book. However, I went in with few expectations and ended up enjoying the read. It is some important, thoughtful anecdotes of people in these situations told over time and weaved together. I especially gravitated towards the Apple Store and Starbucks sections - this recent idea of "better retail" labor practices - and therefore "be happy with what you get" from the corporations. These entities recruit top-notch talent and celebrate them on entry, but then it collapses. These slightly better benefits are highly spoken of, but we know they are not that significant considering how poor the state of employment is in the US. Furhermore, these benefits lead to less turnover and more profit.

Reading about people stuck in these cycles was interesting. While being one-sided on POV, the book leaves much of the interpretation up to you. Also, being as these are actual lives in a current situation, there is no tidy "beginning to end" arc. Overall, a strong set of journalistic profiles worth anyone's time.

[Madison ✨ (mad.lyreading) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mutiny is more of a collection of case studies than a book about the topic of college grads unionizing. While it is interesting, I really wanted more analysis than just a narration of what happened when these people worked to unionize Starbucks, Apple, and.... at least one other thing (dammit what was it?!).

EDIT: If you are Minnesotan or aware of the city of Edina, Minnesota, a warning for you! One of the individuals Scheiber follows is from Edina, and the audiobook narrator consistently pronounces it "uh-dee-na" rather than "eh-dye-na." So you will be experiencing a nails on a chalkboard sensation a few times if listening on audio haha

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and Netgalley for an audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Arathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mutiny is a great book about class and labor relations in the US currently and talks about a few of the movements that have been happening in the last few years. However, it is very wrong about any issue that is not class and doesn't really do intersectionality well, broadly speaking. I have other criticism that I am scared to express. I don't expect you to get everything right, but I expect more from any author than to be systematically wrong about many things in a row. This makes me wonder if the book got a few of the things about class wrong as well- and whether it was confirmation bias that made me believe it.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

[Shanna Simmons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Educated, young and dissolutioned workers unionize at Starbucks, Apple and Amazon in the early 2020's. The author outlines similar movements by grad students and Hollywood writers, as well as excessive verbiage devoted to UAW administration and elections.

This is a work of researched nonfiction with a progressive agenda (to which I personally am sympathetic). Additionally, it's told using an upper class tone. I'd love to see population demographics overlaid on rises of union membership as I suspect that some of the persuasiveness of these arguments comes down to demographics.

Worth reading. Three stars.

[Dailynn Turner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't what I was expecting at all. This book's primary focus is labor movements (which, don't get me wrong, is an interesting subject) and goes into really minute detail about those. I was more interested in the workers themselves and thought this would be a "how did we get here and what is the path forward" kind of book. The author often goes back and forth between workers' stories, which made it hard to keep track of who was who. Also, I really hate that the narrator felt the need to imitate people's voices in tones I saw as disrespectful.

[Madison Hartman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always enjoy a sociology type book with various narratives following specific people and stories. While it was interesting to see how unions were formed in these “dead end” jobs by college educated liberals, I thought we’d lean more into how we got here in this first place.

I was hoping there’d be more discussion on how the promise of a good job if you had a degree has died out in this current economy and why college grads are in their 20’s and 30’s relying on a Starbucks career to pay their bills and feed their family’s despite going into debt for a bachelors degree

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I didn’t have any major issues with the book but found it fairly dry. There wasn’t a lot of analysis in here that was new to me, and the anecdotes were good but fairly narrow in scope. Mainly in they were largely focused on the unionization of Apple and Starbucks around 2023.

It sounds like a few other reviewers also got a different story than they expected, and perhaps it was a marketing thing. Regardless — not a bad book, just not the one I intended to read.