Factually! with Adam Conover - White Collar Workers are Radicalizing with Noam Scheiber

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

For nearly two decades, prospects for college graduates have been dwindling. The worth of a degree has suffered greatly, and it’s become increasingly clear that college grads suffer many of the same hardships as those seeking employment without degrees. With this change, there’s been a push to the left as well as a new level of organization in industries that previously had been without unions. This week, Adam talks to New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber, author of Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, about the shift in value of the college degree and the shift in values of the college-educated. Find Noam's book at factuallypod.com/booksDownload Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/2vjj5nrh #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. See terms and conditions at https://cash.app/legal/us/en-us/card-agreement. Discounts and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures.--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Kanover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, there's a familiar slander that right-wingers or those who are allied with corporate power like to use against anyone who's trying to improve conditions for others, especially in the Trump era. They say that the left, or those who are fighting for working people, are actually just a bunch of rich out-of-touch elites, a bunch of college graduates who majored in woke, drink rosé at brunch, and are hopelessly naive when it comes to understanding what real working people need or want.

But, you know, this is bullshit and it is breaking down across the country because the world has recently gotten worse for college graduates, just like it's gotten worse for everybody else. I mean, yes, there are advantages to having a college degree. But those advantages have been dwindling in the face of soaring student debt and declining employment prospects in white-collar work across the country. Even developers, computer programmers, have been getting screwed. You know, they used to be the princes and princesses of the American workforce, but now

they're all getting laid off and replaced with AI. Even they are struggling in the muck like the rest of us. And this decades-long trend has put more and more college graduates in the same position as those without degrees, working dead-end jobs that they feel won't improve until they can force management to improve them. In other words, college graduates are feeling more and more like members of the proletariat, more and more like average workers. And as that trend has happened, there have been new opportunities for workers across

socioeconomic divides to seek common cause and organize together. And that means that workers have been fighting back. I mean, the decline in value of the college degree, is one of the most significant socioeconomic changes to America this century. It's a rewrite of the social contract that we were all taught as children. And today, we're going to talk about it and the interesting possibilities that that shift is creating for the labor movement as we see new potential for white-collar workers to rise up in support of all workers and against the capitalist classes. We're going to get into that with an incredible conversation with one of the best labor reporters in the country.

I can't wait for you to hear it. Before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support the show and all the conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Con, over five bucks a month. It gets you every episode of this show ad-free. We got a lot of other community perks as well. We would love to have you. And if you want to come see me on the road, coming up soon, I'm doing my new hour of stand-up comedy,

March 20th and 21st in Hartford, Connecticut, April 2nd through 4th in Sacramento, California, April 10th through 12th in La Jolla, California. on April 18th, I am recording my new hour at the Den Theater in Chicago, Illinois, two big shows. April 18th, don't miss it. If you want your laugh to be recorded on camera, would love to have you there. And May 8th through 9th, I'll be in Kansas City, Missouri, head to Adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. And now, let's get to this week's interview. My guest today is Nome Scheiber.

He's a reporter for the New York Times, one of the best labor reporters in the country. And he's the author of the great new book, Mutiny, The Rise of the, and revolt of the college-educated working class. Please welcome Noam Scheiber. Noam, thank you so much for being on the show, man. Great, great to be here. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

I love having you on. You're one of my favorite labor reporters in America. You've done great work over the years. But your new book is about how there's been sort of a labor revolt on the part of the college-educated working class in this country, which is somewhat surprising, I think, because we're supposed to think that a college degree means prosperity, right? A lot of people don't think of people who have college degrees as being in the, quote, working class. So what has happened?

And by the, rightly or wrongly, we can get into that. But, you know, how is the promise of higher education changed in America? And how has prospects changed for this group of people? Yeah. You know, so this is a generation of people who graduated from college really beginning right after the Great Recession. And kind of all the way through. through to, you know, I'd say this coming June. So all the way to the present. And this is a group of people who were probably given the hardest cell of any generation in history about why they

need to go to college. You know, everyone from their parents to their president, you know, Obama is telling people they have to go to college. And they did the most to prepare of any generation to prepare to go to college, whether it was homework or AP classes or SAT prepped. And more of them than ever went to college. And then right when they got there, that was the moment when the tectonic plates were shifting and the return to a college degree was just starting to stagnate. And that really starts, you know, right around actually starts a few years before the Great Recession, but we really see it with the Great Recession. And it just never really recovers. I think a lot of people thought, well, you know, we have this terrible recession, this financial crisis, things will

bounce back. And they did bounce back a bit. But if you look at the data, even through right on the the pandemic, the job market for college grads, recent college grads hadn't really recovered. And then, of course, the pandemic lands like another meteor and sort of totally derails everything all over again. So you have this generation of people who had really high expectations about what college was going to do for them. And then you have the reality of what they found when they graduated from college. And that reality has just been pretty lousy for 15, 20 years now. Obviously, it's, you know, in certain moments like the Great Recession, the pandemic has been worse and others, but even the past few years, we've seen the unemployment rate for recent college

grads really shoot up. And it's exceeded the overall unemployment rate for three, four years now. And we've just never seen that kind of sustained unemployment rate for recent college grads. So it's really been a kind of radicalizing experience for a lot of these folks. And as a result, a lot of them have kind of, you know, sort of stood up to their employers, have formed unions, have gone on strike. And you just see. it in their politics, too, a lot of them have sort of moved leftward, embraced, you know, socialist politicians, Zora Mandani in New York is very much someone who's come to represent these folks. And I think it's really a sign of what's the common. We're just at the beginning of this,

this kind of revolt of the college educated. Yeah, it strikes me that, you know, I graduated in 2004. I'm on the elder end of what people call millennials. I've railed against generational language my entire career. But at this point, you have to accept it. I think it's just deeply embedded. in our society at this point. So I'm on that end. And a couple of years after I graduated was the housing collapse and the Great Recession. A couple of good years before that. But you got to also have to remember, I graduated like in between 9-11 and the Great Recession.

And so then the Great Recession happens. Oh, now it's a much worse time to try to get a job. The economy is slowing down in all these ways. Then through to COVID on the other side. and there really never was a boom period for new employment even between those. And what's funny is there's been a lot of positive things in the economy that have happened. For some people, the stock market has been on an unprecedented bull run that entire time since 2008. Went down for COVID, but then it's shot back up again.

So there's been huge amounts of growth in other parts of the economy. But at no time has anyone been saying, oh, it's a great time to graduate college and get a job, except in a couple industries. Like if you were leaving and going to the tech industry, you know, get a STEM degree and go into tech, well, then you could get that cushy six-figure job right out of college, maybe. But now even that's reversing because all those companies are having layoffs. They blame it on AI, but I'm also hearing, well, it's because interest rates are a lot higher

now and they can't get the free money. So, you know, it's no longer you're going to, you know, graduate college and immediately go work for Salesforce or whatever. So is it worse now than it was in, you know, when I, when I was leaving college around the Great Recession time, has it, have things gotten even worse? Yeah. So I'd say the Great Recession was probably the worst it got. But as you say, it just never, the labor market for recent college grads just never entirely

healed. It is, you know, as late as far after that as 2019, 2020, the market for recent college grads just wasn't like what it was pre-grade recess, or at least it wasn't on the same trajectory. And I think, as you say, I mean, the stock market was booming. Your housing prices were shooting up, but you had to like own assets in order to participate in that bonanza. I mean, I graduated from college in 1998, so I'm a couple years older than you. And you don't look it, but good for you. Thank you. Thank you. But that may have been the best year in the history of the world to graduate from college. You know, the job market was booming. You know, you could,

you can get it on the stock market, on the, on the housing market. But, you know, just a few years after me, it all, it all kind of turned south. And as you say, I mean, the tech companies were once the thing that you did to ensure that you had the highest odds of success here. And even before the AI boom, before generative AI and Chad GPT, we've seen the labor market. And the labor market. for people in STEM fields and tech really wobble. We've just never seen a kind of elevated, sustained elevated unemployment rate like this that we have over, you know, the last three, four, five years.

And I think, you know, I think you're right. I mean, you said that when interest rates were low, these companies were hiring, like it was completely costless. And in some sense, in some sense it was. But as soon as those interest rates shot up in late 22 and into 23, we started seeing these mass layoffs, not just in tech, but in adjacent industries too, like video games. I mean, you had tens of thousands of video game workers who were laid off. And it's just been a brutal job market for those folks.

And there's just a ton of college educated folks whose dream was to work in the gaming industry. And we're willing to take these kind of low-paying entry-level jobs. And those jobs are just completely dried up. So it's really been a widespread thing. Yeah. And look at how other industries have structurally transformed. I mean, I imagine was your degree in journalism or some sort of media field? It was actually in economics.

Okay, fair enough. Well, imagine you were, now you're a journal. Imagine you were studying journalism. 1998, you graduate, oh, I can go work for any one of a number of newspapers around the country. Now you study journalism. Well, where would you possibly get a job? There's nowhere. Look at where I work, media, you know.

I recently spoke, I have a friend who's a professor at NYU. I spoke in front of some NYU kids at Tisch, you know, which is a media study school. And, you know, they teach, like, how to be a television writer classes, you know? And the kids are like, okay, so what should I do? Should I, like, move to L.A.? And I'm like, no. I mean, the industry is collapsing, it's not collapsing, but it's contracting massively. And so there's literally school set up that are teaching people, hey, first you become a

writer's assistant, then you can get a job at it, like, an NBC show and you climb the ladder. And, like, the industry is still there. but the ladder has collapsed, right? Where the entry level and then to move up. And that's the case in so many white collar or college-educated industries. Do you feel like it kind of mirrors a little bit like de-industrialization in some way? That, you know, are college people now going through what folks with the high school education went through a couple decades ago where, hey, this, you know, these entire industries that were propping up entire sectors of the economy. are suddenly leaving or going away?

I do. Yeah, I do. I think it's a similar arc. And again, all of this is before AI really impacts this at large scale. But I do. I think we've seen, you know, for slightly different reasons for blue-collar folks, it was often a globalization, sending jobs offshore and, of course, some automation. I think in this case, as you say, consolidation has been a big, has been a big impetus here.

Right. We've seen, you know, if you look at a field like health care, you know, we talk about getting a STEM degree. But if you, you know, historically, if you put a med school, become a doctor, you know, your high status, you know, highly trained, highly respected professional. But over the last 15, 20 years, we had massive, massive consolidation in healthcare, pharmacies too. And so you have doctors who sort of grew up thinking they're going to be these kind of highly respected professionals and deferred to. by people in the medical field and the medical industrial complex. But now, if you're a doctor, you basically work for a massive healthcare system. And you are just kind of a rank and file employee who basically takes orders from,

you know, what they would say are the bean counters. You know, we have business people, management consultants who, you know, finance people, who run these huge, huge healthcare, you know, industrial complexes. And, you know, whereas a generation ago, the doctor had a lot of freedom to kind of like, you know, exercise their professional judgment as they saw fit. Now there are all these sort of metrics and incentives and all these kinds of ways that doctors are just, you know, feel like they're just kind of, you know, making widgets, basically. So when I talked to doctors, you know, I wrote about doctors unionizing back in 23.

There was a big wave of doctors in the private sector unionizing. And they would tell me, you know, we just feel like. like any other worker, any other rank and file worker. In fact, one of them told me that he was taking his kids to a UAW picket line because he sort of wanted them to appreciate it, what it was like to be a worker and to kind of stand up for yourself because he felt like, you know, regardless of what kind of worker you were going to be, whether you were a doctor or an auto worker, this is kind of the future of how you sort of, you know, get a fair deal. Wow. Yeah, I was going to ask what examples do we have of highly educated workers unionizing, but you kind of

of can't find a more highly educated worker than a doctor. And that is a big change because, you know, nurses unions have been very important unions for a long time. Some of the most kick-ass unions in the country are nurses unions. But that's always struck me that, oh, there aren't generally doctors unions. And, you know, even in the airlines, the pilots have unions, right? And so do the flight attendants. But in hospitals, they haven't even had them. But now, they're starting to. I wasn't aware of that. Tell me some of those stories. Yeah, no, I'd say it really, you rarely saw doctors in the private sector, some in the public sector, you know, working for the state or for city hospitals, but rarely in the private sector. I think I wrote about the first

private sector doctors union, at least in many, many decades back in 2015. It was a health care system in Oregon, actually. And they were complaining about the same things that we were just talking about, feeling like the bean counters were in charge and they were just kind of basically on a kind of medical assembly line and they felt like they really needed something to give them more space to exercise their judgment to see fewer patients to take more time with each patient and that the kind of consolidation in the healthcare system was really eroding that. So that starts a little bit before the pandemic but then the pandemic just completely supercharges it. And in kind of 22, 23, you start getting all these private sector doctors expressing interest in organizing.

You see a lot with residents too. Residents really, you know, you have a huge wave of organizing among medical residents. But then the largest, I think to this day, the largest private sector health care union in the country is that a medical system in Minnesota and Wisconsin called Alina. And at the time, I think about 500, mostly primary care doctors, unionized in 23. and it was just a huge wave of organizing among these folks. Similar reasons, a lot of consolidation. It was like a huge healthcare system.

There are all these kind of metrics, you know, that they were supposed to focus on. And they just felt like they were constantly frazzled, constantly being drawn away from the focus that they, you know, from what they wanted to focus on, which was their relationship with patients. So, yeah, it's been a big wave. You know, another industry, I mean, we just talked about video game workers. Yeah. And as you say, I mean, I think we have this. big wave of video game worker organizing beginning in kind of 21, 22. And it starts with these quality assurance workers, you know,

people whose job is to basically play video games over and over and over and over and over and find all the bugs before you release it into the world. Yeah, exactly. And this, you know, it sounds maybe like a really romantic thing, but it's incredibly tedious to play a game over and over and over again until, you know, on the 17th try,

you find the bug. I had a friend in high school who, one of his first jobs, I think out of college was, was being a play tester. I think for Konami, and we loved video games growing up. And we were going, oh, that job is so cool. And he was like, yeah, man, it's not.

It's not. It's not a good. You get these crunch periods where you're doing it, you know, 60, 70 hours a week just before they release the game into the world. And these, you know, just incredibly grueling. So they were the kind of the first wave at Activision, Blizzard, Microsoft. We had a number of video game testers organized. But then by 23, 24, we were starting to see what's called wall-to-wall unions, you know, not just the testers, but the producers, the designers, the engineers.

And so now it's some of the most high-profile game studios in the world, really. We have these wall-to-wall unions. And these are very high-paid, sophisticated workers who only in the last few years have even considered the idea of unionizing. So it's really spread quite a bit among college-educated photos. Okay, I know. You have one mission in life. Creating miniature restaurant supplies for people who want to make their guinea pigs habitats look like retro 1950s diners. You've got the glittery red vinyl booth to nestle those fuzzy guinea pig bottoms.

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even before this wave of unionization, you'd have cases where a game comes out, it's a big hit, and they immediately closed the studio that made the game and lay everybody off because they would run the studio in such a way that even though the game comes out and is a hit, the studio loses money on it.

And so they're like, oh, we got to lay everybody off. And the people who made the game are like, what the fuck? And, you know, what do I do? They all live in Irvine or like Vancouver or somewhere. Those are nice cities, like, you know, it's not like there's immediately another place to go work. It's not like Hollywood where, okay, well, my gig ended at Paramount.

Now I go work at Warner Brothers, which, by the way, one of those companies is about to buy the other. Right, exactly. So, you know, the video game industry is really interesting because it's one in which, like you say, you have these really well-educated, highly trained, specific white-collar workers who are working in the high end of American media, very comparable to the movie industry, right? Yeah, absolutely. An individual video game can make way more money than a movie. They take years and years to produce.

It's these large teams, specialized abilities. And yet, you know, in Hollywood, we were able to build sort of a stable workforce, middle class workforce. In video games, it's like you work someplace for two years, then they kick you to the curb and you find yourself unemployed with no prospects. Is there something that has like structurally changed,

you know, in American capitalism that's caused that to be the case for that industry. It's a good example because it's such a new industry, right? It didn't exist in its current form 30 years ago. So why did the form it grew up in, you know, take such a malignant form? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think the Hollywood analogy is a really good one. I think I might reverse it slightly and say it actually is the kind of purest form of this kind of industry where you kind of come together,

you invest a ton of resources and time to build this project. But once the project is over the sort of rationale for keeping everyone together weekends, and you just kind of let people go. And in Hollywood, you guys solve that problem by unionizing, at least partly by unionizing, right? That you continue to have health care benefits and pension benefits while you look around for the next gig.

And I think part of the allure of the union for these folks in the video game industry, I'm not going to suggest that they were like Hollywood labor historians, but they're kind of geographically adjacent. And I think got a sense that there were real benefits to unionizing that were on display among actors and writers and directors in Hollywood. In fact, some, as you know, some people who do voice work in video games also do voice work in, you know, in movies and TV and our SAG members. And so there was some overlap there that I think probably helped plant the seed. And the thought was just that, that, you know, if we hadn't sort of built these institutions that made it more humane for workers and possible for workers to build a career rather than just a kind of a gig, a gig work existence, Hollywood would probably look kind of more like that today. Yeah.

But it's the institution that actors and writers and directors built that helped sort of smooth out the boom busts for the workers. And I think the video game workers saw that and thought that they could really benefit. Yeah, did more, I mean, the unions in Hollywood do more than smooth up the boom and bust. They give us control over the credits process. That's like literally the reason that the Writers Guild formed was to, so that writers could exert control and say, you know, the Writers Guild decides who gets a credit, not the studio, right? The city can't just give it to their favorite screenwriter.

The Writers Guild determines, no, no, no, this person wrote the lion's share so they get the credit, etc. And a lot of other important functions as well. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out two things that, A, SAG-A-FRA voice actors have gone on strike twice against the video game industry and have won gains by doing so

and did that before the wave that you're talking about in one case. But also, you know, there's often a misconception about unions and we see this a lot in Hollywood where some people think that like the union comes in and offers unionization to the workers.

Right. And so they go, oh, why won't the union whether the Writers Guild or the Directors Guild or whatever. Why won't the union come in and give us the benefits that it has? They must be, you know, they must be snobs about it or something like that. Really, that's not how unionization works. The union is like a structure that can sort of help you as the workers take control of your circumstances.

You know, there's organizers and other resources that can help in that struggle. But really, it is the workers themselves who force unionization to happen. Like the only reason workers ever unionize is. is because workers at a particular company said, we've had enough, what the fuck do we do about it, start meeting among each other? And then they say, you know what, let's talk to this union or that union

and see if they'll help us. But then the first thing that union looks for is, do we have a core of angry, motivated, organized workers who are going to take a risk in order to, you know, get themselves the coverage? And so it takes the workers being radicalized, right? And if you don't have that, you can't build a union. And so really what you're charting here in this book is workers in these various sectors becoming radicalized enough to actually take collective action.

And that's what's happened. Let's stay on video games. That's what happened in video games over the last couple of years. Yeah. No question. I mean, you're absolutely right about the way this tends to work. I mean, I've been covering this stuff for over a decade now. And I don't think I've really ever seen a kind of top-down organizing effort work.

I mean, I'm sure there are some examples you could argue at different times that, you know, UAW, you know, a big industrial union has maybe kind of done it a little more top-down than bottom-up. But even there, you know, it rarely works unless the workers are deeply invested and basically leading it. So I think that's exactly right. You know, in video games, I think what you saw was this kind of crunch period that we talked about for the testers. was just getting, like, ridiculous. And part of it was, you know, during the pandemic, obviously, you had working conditions deteriorate.

You had a huge demand for these games because everyone's at home, you know, sitting on their couch, wanting to be entertained. And so while this, this, the issues, the labor issues had certainly existed before the pandemic, the pandemic really supercharges them as it does in a lot of workplaces. And people just decide enough is enough. I mean, you had some other sort of idiosyncratic issues, too. You had various accusations of sexual harassment and discrimination at different studios that, you know, again, had a radicalizing effect.

But I think overall it was basically you had a lot of college educated workers. They were not paid very much and they were working ridiculous hours and felt like no ownership over what they were doing. At times, you know, they were even brought in as contractors and you kind of have to prove yourself as a contractor. and then eventually you become a permanent employee. In my book, I write about two employees who are QA testers at a place called ID Software, which is now owned by Microsoft. It makes, you know, Doom, you know, is their big property, you know, hugely popular, first-person shooter games.

I mean, it is the company that created Doom in the 90s and the company still exists today. It's owned by Microsoft. But like, so historically important games. I mean, arguably the first, I mean, people will. quibble, but arguably one of the, if not the first first person shooter games, you know, as he said, really shapes the industry. And so these guys had wanted to be video game designers from the time they were kids. They go to the University of Dallas, sorry, University of Texas at Dallas. They major in video game design. One guy, one of them was

interested in animation. The other was interested in just designing the games. They both graduate with degrees in video game design, it's incredibly hard to get into the industry. Of course, they want to be designing games, not testing them, but they realize that the only jobs they can get is as testers. And they typically begin as contractors, as I said, not even full-time employees.

You know, after a few years of doing this, they're still testers. They're being worked incredibly hard, particularly during crunch periods. And they haven't seen their wages, you know, rise very much. And at a certain point, they're thinking, what the hell?

What is going on here? And that's, you know, and then you'd kind of overlay the pandemic on that, and that proves to be the spark. So, yeah, it's a very similar, you know, unionizing is a very strange thing. I'm sure you've encountered this too. It's,

every story is highly idiosyncratic and highly personal. And each workplace even has its own kind of anthropology. And if you're not sort of attuned to that anthropology in the particular circumstances and sort of norms and rituals of that workplace, you're going to completely whiff on it. But there are these common themes, too. Yes. And overwork, underpay, disrespect, you know, tend to be common themes as well. So it's a little like kind of highly idiosyncratic process combined with some like structural forces that tend to drive this vote. Yeah. I mean, every union I sort of describe as as being a different nation with its own

history, its own political history. And so of course, every unionization effort is sort of like its own revolution. You know, if you look at revolutions around the world, it's like, well, the American revolution is nothing like the French revolution is nothing like the Chinese communist revolution, etc. And unionization efforts are the same way, where it starts in a different part of the business. And, you know, some are very successful. Some stall out. Some, you know, well, let's talk about how effective some of these are. Like, how effective have the video game unionization efforts been? in changing conditions for these workers. Because first, you can win the union,

you can win recognition of the union. Then you need to win a contract. That's when the first part of the job is finally done. And, you know, the contract may or may not be a vast improvement over your previous conditions, right? Yep. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, you put your finger on it.

It's one of these sort of cruel ironies of unionizing is that it's such a kind of exhaustive. relentless effort that you have to go through to win the union election. And then the real work starts, you know. And then if you're actually going to change anything, you have to sort of get involved in this kind of, you know, prolonged, often stalemated back and forth with your employer. And so the video game workers, they started to win at studios owned by Activision. You know, Activision Blizzard.

There was one in Wisconsin that was the first and another one in Albany owned by Blizzard. They actually make Diablo, another very popular game franchise. So those were the first two. And what was interesting about this process is at the very moment that these workers were unionizing at Activision Blizzard, Microsoft was trying to acquire Activision Blizzard for $60,70 billion is one of the largest mergers in history. And in order to sort of grease the deal in the eyes of the Biden administration, Microsoft eventually agrees that they will stay neutral in union campaigns, eventually at Microsoft too, but initially with any of the Activision Studios that unionized that would have been taken over by Microsoft.

Microsoft says, hey, we're going to stay neutral. It goes down very well with the Biden administration, which was a very pro-union administration. And then I'm not sure how much they were aware at the time when they made this commitment, which was kind of focused on Activision, the company they were acquiring, But there was already unionizing going on at Microsoft video game CBS2. And so those workers kind of pipe up and say, hey, we love it that you agree to stay neutral in these Activision Union campaigns. But what about us if we want to unionize? And Microsoft eventually said yes, it'll apply to you as well.

And so we had a number of unions form at Microsoft-owned studios as well, including these workers at ID Software in Dallas. Bethesda was another, you know, another big studio, too. If I can make two points about this before you go on, first of all, that neutrality, it's almost more than neutrality because almost every company is so anti-union that they make it extremely, extremely difficult for workers to unionize. And to really, but unionization is your right as a employee or as an American under labor law. But the companies will make it very, very difficult for you to actually. exercise that right. They will wage an anti-union publicity campaign. They'll put, you know, put pressure on workers. When a company is neutral, it basically clears the way for the workers to unionize. So it's, it's almost more of like an acquiescing to unionization on the part of the company. That's the first thing. The second thing is my memory is that this was explicitly like a deal that was made by the CWA, the communications workers, which is the union that was organizing the video game workers.

They said, we will literally bless the merger. We will tell the Biden administration that we support the merger, I believe. Do I have this right? That's right. Yeah, that's great. If Microsoft agrees to this. And I actually, remember, I DM'd with, you know, just somebody I know at the CWA, not a person in a big decision making, just someone who works for the union and was organizing

video game workers. I was like, I'm a little worried, guys. You're like, you're blessing a merger. Here in Hollywood, at least in the writers guild, we've tried to fight the mergers. You're blessing it in exchange to get these workers unilized. Are you a little worried? And they said, well, you know, mergers are bad, but, you know, this is a really big deal if we can

get these workers organized. And the result has been, yes, many, many, probably thousands of video game workers have been able to organize swiftly and, you know, seriously as a result of this deal. But, you know, I came out very strongly against the Microsoft

Activision. I made a TikTok which went, my viral in video game Twitter circles. And a lot of people yelling at me that I was an idiot because, oh, it's going to be so great because Microsoft is a great company is going to buy these companies. Guess what? They have shuttered studios. They have canceled projects.

They have laid off thousands of workers. And I, you know, I haven't asked any of these workers. Hey, do you think that the the cost benefit was worth it? But it was definitely at a large price that they extracted this neutrality agreement at the very least, right? No question. This was controversial within the labor amendment. You're absolutely right to put your finger on that.

I think there was certainly kind of rank and file organizers were very concerned about this. And as you say, they've had a series of layoffs multiple rounds since 2023 when the interest rates rose and all these tech companies started cutting costs. So it is by no means a kind of no-brainer. You're absolutely right to point that out. You're also right on the point about neutrality. I mean, I think you need look no further than the fact that about 70, you know, in a high 60s to 70% of Americans say in public opinion surveys that they support unions. And yet only about 10, 11% of Americans are in unions. So there's a pretty big, you know, gap there.

And that gap, you know, often is enforced by the kind of anti-union campaigns that many employers run. And as you say, the higher consultants and law firms. And there's a whole template for doing this. when you stand down, as you say, it's not just kind of, you know, setting up some kind of totally neutral laboratory conditions. It's, it really does typically pave the way for for the employees to unionize. If every company was neutral on unions, probably about 50% of American workers would be in unions at this point. But it's because they fight against it that were not. It would be substantially higher. No question about that. And so, you know, on the, on the bargaining,

I think the workers in these unions would say Microsoft, you know, you know, drove a hard bargain. These these bargaining sessions, the bargaining went, you know, for well over a year, which is not unusual for a first contract. But they did reach a contract that raised wages. You know, they read some accommodations about remote work, which a lot of people were concerned about. And they had a bit in the vein of the WGA contract that you all reached out for the strike. There were provisions about artificial intelligence, which these testers were very concerned about because obviously if you have a bunch of AI agents patrolling the internet, they can probably play video games and figure out where the flaws are.

So there were AI protections that I think a lot of the workers considered very important as well. How about have these doctors made gains? Yeah, the doctors are a little trickier. Adelina, they have been very aggressive in resistance. this and contesting the results of the union election there. I would say that we've probably seen more gains among the residents. You know, the medical residency has historically been this kind of brutal, you know, this kind of brutal endurance test, you know, where you're not supposed to sleep and, you know, you're running from patient to patient at all hours the day and night.

And I think a lot of the resident unions, particularly kind of with the sympathy that was built up in public opinion post-pandemic, have really been able to make some gains there and kind of just enforcing humane hours and kind of attention and care to the physical and mental health of the doctors. So I think we've probably seen the biggest gains there. It's still a new enough thing among the doctors themselves that we're still kind of seeing how it shakes. out, but there is more of a pattern that we've established among the residents that that has kind of, I think most would say, improve the quality of life of a typical medical resident. So in the pit terms, it's like the Dr. Mel's are unionizing. Dr. Robbie, not quite yet.

We're not getting there. They're unizing, but the health care systems are fighting it pretty aggressively. You know, you hear a lot of this in different white collar professions, you know, certainly with engineers. You hear about it. You know, I've written about architects who are unionizing. you hear about it there. But the employer will typically say,

sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes explicitly, unions are great. We love unions, but they're for blue-collar workers. You're a highly educated, highly trained professional. We respect you too much to let you do not. You know, these are for, you know, we all agree that people working on a factory should have a union.

But for, you know, a highly, highly trained professional like yourself, we just don't see why you'd want a union. It would sort of, you know, it would undermine merit and, you know, restrict some of the freedom that you have to exercise your judgment. And in fact, a lot of doctors say, no, we want the union to protect our ability to exercise our judgment. Yeah, well, two dynamics there. One is they're, when they say that, they're appealing to the ego of these highly trained professionals of doctors. I put so much work in and I'm better than the next guy. And I'm a heart surgeon. He's just endocrinologist. Fuck endocrinologist.

I do the real work or whatever. And that works on a lot of people. They try to do that to us in Hollywood, too. You know, oh, you guys aren't real workers. You know, you're... But one of the reasons they do that also is because these highly trained, highly specialized workers, when they unionize, have a huge amount of power in the workplace. Like, I'll just speaking about airlines.

Pilots unions have historically had a ton more power than the flight attendants unions, for example, which is something that, you know, flight attendants unions have had to make up for, right, in order to get the same protections that pilots have had. The entertainment unions here in Hollywood are some of the strongest unions in the country with some of the best health plans. I can only imagine if a major hospital system actually had a real muscular doctor's union of all the doctors who worked for their hospital, they would have to really fucking deal with that. They would have to, like, listen to that union. They would have to like, you know, take those new. negotiations very seriously.

So the reason they have that campaign is because they're afraid of those workers unionizing. The reason they say, oh, well, you're not the janitors. The janitors need a union. You don't. Is because the janitor's union has less structural power than a doctor's union would. And that's part of why sometimes people question in Hollywood, for example, why do the showrunners or the directors, why do they need unions at all? you know, and they say that from a left perspective, you know, oh, us, us further down the tonal pole, we're the ones who really needed.

Yeah. But you have to realize, no, no, no, if everybody who is structurally in the position of a worker in relation to the corporation, everyone who is selling our labor for, to the company, even if we're selling it at a very high value, if we can all have solidarity and work together, those highly paid unions, those highly specialized unions, they have a lot of power that can be used to everybody else's benefit. And in the Writers Guild, we do that. the power that our showrunners have,

the Shonda Rhymes and the J.J. Abrams and, et cetera, and myself, I was a showrunner for a number of years. The power that we have, we use to win gains for the rank and file as well. That's sort of the whole point. It's a Robin Hood kind of structure. And, you know, that's something,

imagine that in health care, right? Imagine if we have nurses unions, we have other unions in health care. Imagine if we had strong doctors unions who were fighting in solidarity with the nurses and with those other groups, then we might actually have a chance to make the entire healthcare system better.

Yeah, no, no question. I mean, to me, you know, in reporting out this book, I think the thing, friends of mine would ask me, like, what's the most surprising thing that you learned while reporting this book? And to me, the thing that I saw over and over again was the way in which these highly trained professionals, whether they're doctors or architects,

video game workers, started to see themselves as workers. You know, not, you know, not kind of professionals, not, you know, future managers, not future owners, you know, in the tech space. But really workers and this kind of worker consciousness. I got a little of that when I first started on this beat of the times in the kind of late 2010s. But really the pandemic supercharged that. And it was so stark to see doctors, tech workers, architects, engineers, you know, down to people who, you know, I, I saw this a lot too where, you know, typically, you know, historically, if someone graduated

the year I graduated from college in the late 90s and they might have gone to work at a Starbucks or an Apple store for a couple of years, but they never thought of themselves as like workers. You know, they thought of themselves as like, oh, I'm just kind of hanging out here while I figure out what I'm going to do or anybody in a grad school or law school, but they did not think of themselves as like workers. And so many of the people that I encountered who were college educated leading these campaigns at Starbucks, at Apple, they really thought, themselves as workers in a way that I just had not seen kind of at a large scale before. It was very striking in writing and reporting the book.

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60 days gives you plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you are saving on every shipment. That shipstation.com code factually. Shipstation.com promo code factually. Let's talk about tech workers. We've done video games, but tech workers are some of the most highly paid sought-after workers in America. at least they have been until the last year or two. How has unionization been going there? And you mentioned Apple.

Let's start there. Yeah. So Apple is fascinating. We had the first Apple store in the country unionized in Towson, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore in 2022. And that was the company was not neutral. They did not want this to happen. But the Towson workers, you know, and a lot of them, you know, college educated, they'd gone

to Towson University, which was very close to the Apple store. and a lot of them that had worked at the store in college and then graduated and they found themselves still working there. And so that was a successful campaign. There was another Apple store that unionized in Oklahoma City a few months later. And so I think right now we're too. That was especially interesting because I think it also tracked a larger trend kind of in the American economy, which is used to have a number of employers who both thought of themselves. I think the workers thought of the employer as these kind of exceptional employers.

You know, you have the apples and Starbucks and Trader Joe's and they sort of distinguish themselves. You know, yes, maybe it's a retail job, but we're going to pay you a little better. We're going to give you better benefits. You're going to do kind of more interesting things. And over the kind of past 10, 15 years, those jobs just kind of got steadily degraded, at least if you ask the workers. So give you one example from Apple. Apple, there's a position at Apple, Apple, Apple retail called a Creative Pro. And what the creatives do is initially they would kind of teach these one-on-one training sessions.

And if you just kind of wanted to know what the cool stuff that your Mac software could do or your iPhone could do, you just kind of can book an hour with a creative and they'll talk you through it and kind of, you know, if you want to make videos or, you know, make music, podcasts, whatever. And over the years, that creative job kind of gradually evolved. It went from one-on-one sessions to teaching these bigger classes called Today at Apple. And then gradually they started kind of pulling back on the classes. themselves and just pulling these guys onto the retail floor and making more and more of their job sales, you know? And a lot of these folks were lured into, you know, work at Apple by the idea

that they're going to do something a little different, a little more, a little more creative, a little more interesting. And as Apple kind of gradually just pulled them into more conventional retail jobs, many of them got frustrated. And it was actually a few of the creatives at the store in Towson who really really helped lead the organizing campaign there. And I think we actually saw that at other places too at Starbucks, you know, where Starbucks had historically had incredibly good health care benefits and, you know, lots of other benefits, college, you know, free college tuition at Arizona State. But over the years, a lot of the workers there also felt like, you know, this is really kind of becoming degraded and it's not

the same place it was when I started working here 10 years ago. So, you know, so that's what we saw at Apple. And, you know, beyond the folks in retail in tech, even the engineers, I I think they also felt like their, you know, their experience was being degraded. You know, in the first Trump administration, you had a lot of folks working at big tech companies, you know, the Googles and Amazon's of the world, sort of speaking up and being able to organize, you know, a lot of Google workers organized against certain projects where they were concerned that Google technology would be used for, you know, ICE enforcement or to, you know, make kind of warmaking AI capabilities, some of the fights that were, you know, were continuing to have.

And there was a lot of organizing around that among Google engineers. And I think there was a sense in the last few years that the companies have come down much harder on that, which initially can undermine an organizing campaign. But you see that it actually kind of works to build this worker consciousness that we've been talking about. You know, all these workers feel like, hey, I'm a tech worker. I'm privileged. I make a lot of money. My bosses really care what I think.

And then the company starts firing people for organizing against some project that they worry. you know, is going to be used in a way that they don't feel comfortable with. Right. Once people get fired, suddenly they're like, oh, wait. Yes, I'm an engineer, but not actually a worker is sort of, you know, first and foremost. Yeah, that's fascinating because, like, one of the reasons I think that you didn't see unionization in the tech industry for so many years was individual tech workers for a while did have more structural power than the average worker. because, you know, a programmer, you know, there's a really hot market for them. These companies are growing so fast.

Basically, the main cost that they're sinking their money into is this kind of labor. And so, you know, you're a programmer. They treat you really nice. Look, Jerry Garcia's chef is making you dinner. There's all these perks. And also, they sort of treat them as, no, we're going to give you some say in the organization. Like, we really are. You're important here.

And then these workers lived that way for 10, 15 years, right? But then a bunch of them start saying, you know what? No, we actually don't like what the company is doing in a real way. And they try to exert that power. The business starts to shift. They become less powerful. They get smacked down a little bit. Some of them try to organize a union.

That gets smacked. They're like, hold on a second. This is a lie the whole time. Like the scale will start coming off of their eyes overall. There's really been a vibe shift among tech workers in general in that direction, right? Even the ones you haven't unionized. Yeah.

No, there's been some interesting academic work done on this. I wrote a piece recently about Kickstarter. You know, they, I think we're the first high-profile tech company to actually have a union. And they went on strike recently toward the end of last year and, you know, got a fair number of gains. And you really see this, the spread of that, that self-image that we've been talking about, people seeing themselves as workers. And as you say, it's partly a kind of structural shift where the companies realize there's kind of an oversupply of tech people, of software engineers. And partly just, you know, interest rates went up and we can't spend as freely as we did before. But, you know, in the middle of that transition, yeah, there's been just a much harder line from these companies when the workers start piping up.

You know, you've seen a lot of companies start to say, we're not going to have these town hall meetings. often and we're going to have to screen the questions and, you know, all these things that just kind of tighten the screws a little bit in ways that people pick up on. And I think the sum total of the effect is, hey, you know, maybe we weren't, we're not these sort of privileged people that we thought we were all along. And, you know, what's interesting is you start to see these connections across industries, too. I mean, I think you guys saw that during the writer's strike where, you know, the polling, the public polling showed overwhelming support for the writers, for the actors for the auto workers. And so it's not, you know, it's not like doctors sitting there going,

well, you know, I don't really care about these writers or I don't really care about these auto workers. It's, it's, I think the people in one industry seeing that they're kind of fighting a version of the same fight and being much more sympathetic and empathetic toward the workers than we might have seen 10 years ago. I mean, you and I actually talked about this. I think when the writer struck in 2007, 8, it was not nearly the same level of kind of cross industry solidarity that there was in 23. Yeah. I mean, I mean, people who were present for both strikes told me, oh, in 07, people were shouting, go back to work, get a job at us from their cars. And, you know, that was still a successful strike.

You don't need public opinion on your side to win a strike. We won coverage of the Internet, et cetera, or the union that I later became a member of did. But in 2023, we were shocked by the outpouring of public support, not just from other unions or other workers, but just from like members of the people. public. Yeah, absolutely. It really felt like sentiment had shifted. And people had been around the whole time, like at the Union were like doubly shocked because they had grown up at a time when, oh, you know, everybody hates us and we just

have to use our power anyway. But now to be sort of one of the most popular groups of people in America in 2023 was pretty shocking to them. Yeah, you covered the writer's strike. What, actually I want to ask you about one more tech company. after. But just tell me what your observation was about the writer's strike. Yeah. So a couple of things about the writer's strike. I mean, I thought the polling that we saw, you know, it was literally like 70, 75%. And actually later, you know, Gallup put out these

polls looking at public support for the writers, the actors, the auto workers. And I think for the writers, it was about 70%. But then I asked Gallup to break it down college, non-college. And the college folks were even higher, even more supportive. So it was like 75-65. So, you know, that just kind of shows this level of kind of class consciousness that the college educated folks have these days. You know, to me, I think it goes back to what you said about showrunners and producers in Hollywood. I think that the AMPTP, the industry trade group that bargains on the other side of the table from you all, I think there was an assumption, and I read about this in the book, that, you know, we'll be able to kind of carve up the constituency here a little bit.

Well, you know, ultimately there's still a lot of like pretty high paid producers, very successful showrunners. They're going to kind of be able, we're going to be able to reason with them. And I think what happened, and this is something I really tried to drill down on in the book, is I think they've way overestimated the number of those like very comfortable, very successful showrunners and producers, and way underestimated the number of like extremely pissed off. downwardly mobile writers.

It was just a pretty large miscalculation. And it's for the reason that you described. I mean, there used to be this ladder. You know, you start as a junior writer in a room. And you're kind of on this track. And you kind of make these steps. And over, you know, in the kind of streaming area, so many people I talk to would, you know,

get their first job in a writer's room, be so happy to be a member of the guild, get their health care, get, paid a reasonable rate. And then they'd be unemployed for a year or two. And then they'd have to go back to being an assistant. And it may take them five, six, seven years to break back into a writer's room. In my book, I write about a woman named Sidney Mitchell, who was a captain at the Disney lot. And she was a writer at NCIS. And she worked so hard for like, you know, eight, 10 years after college, finally gets a job as a staff writer at NCIS. Actually,

NCIS, New Orleans. And then CBS shuts down. You know, they end NCS New Orleans, and she's unemployed for like a year or two after that. Has to go, you know, work is like a personal assistant to a family in Hollywood. Finally gets another job that says a writer's assistant, you know, which she had been, you know, like years earlier. And this was the job that she had when you all went on strike. And so, you know, there are hundreds of Sydney Mitchell's out there in Hollywood. And getting a staff writer job on a broadcast show used to be, okay, you're in, you know. And now you're going to keep working.

because this industry is healthy and you'll keep growing. And so many people found their stories stalling out. And we hear that all the time. And, you know, I'm still on the board of the Writers Guild. I should be clear to say, we hear these stories all the time. And it's still stuff we're fighting against. But also a dynamic that was happening was the showrunners themselves were also under these pressures. You know, we do these big mass member meetings at hotel, you know, in a hotel ballroom, get a thousand writers together.

And one of things I'm very proud of in our union. is, you know, we in leadership sit up there and anyone who wants to come to the mic after we make our presentation can say whatever they want and we'll listen and respond. And, you know, prior to a contract negotiation that's normally people talking about the pressures on them. And that's usually, you know, like you say, the lower level folks saying, hey, here's what I face as a staff writer. We had showrunners coming up to the microphone saying, I don't want to say which shows actually because it makes the people too identifiable. But like hit shows on, you know, pay cable networks, HBO Showtime type people,

coming up to the mic and saying, I am being worked to the bone. I am being asked to do more with less. I can't take care of my staff the way that I want to. I can't make the show the way that I want to. My quality of life is going down. I'm being paid less than I was before. And these are the people are supposed to be at the top, you know?

And so the companies aren't even doing a good job of separating, you know, the powerful, highly paid people out. They're at this point, you know, grinding everybody down. And I think that's what you see across the economy is even the highest level of worker who they used to be able to say, oh, you get the extra perks. Well, they don't get the perks anymore. They don't get the favoritism. They don't get the company car or whatever.

The thing that used to, you know, keep those workers separate from the rest of the proletariat. That's right. They've proletarianized all of us. Or something that we used to say in the guild was they're trying to turn us all into Uber drivers. Right. That was a message that really everyone said, yes, I do feel that way. They are trying to take away my autonomy, take away my stability, and make me feel like I'm a gig worker. And that's no offense to Uber drivers.

They should be treated better as well. The company that I wanted to ask you about, because you mentioned them before, was Google. Because that's a really interesting unionization effort because there is an Al-Intyreiber. Alphabet Workers Union, right? Alphabet is the new name of the parent company of Google. And, but they, they sort of have a minority of workers in Google right now, right? Like, they are an active union and they are getting good work done and exerting pressure, but they've been doing so without representing most of the workers in that for that company, right? Can you tell me it all about that effort?

Correct. Yeah, it is, as you say, it's a minority union. Sometimes it's called a solidarity union. And it arises from basically U.S. labor law, which gives you certain rights, federal, you know, federally protected labor rights, just for engaging in what's known as collective action, collective activities. So you don't have to be in an NLRB certified union to have these labor rights. Every employee has them. And so the minority union or solidarity union basically is built on that idea that we can engage in sort of collective action. we can bring issues of concern to our employer. We can protest. We can pick it.

We can do a whole variety of things that reflect what, you know, the anxieties that workers are feeling, even if we have a, you know, petition for an election and won an election. And I think the concern at Google, which was probably the right concern, is, you know, is a sprawling company of tens of thousands of workers spread out all across the country, all across the world. And if we had to win an election, even at one site, much. less across multiple sites, we'd have to organize, you know, to win thousands and thousands of votes. And that would just be kind of logistically impractical.

And so I think they made a calculation after a lot of organizing in the kind of late 2010s in 2017, 18, 19, that was a big protest over sexual harassment, accusations of sexual harassment among a very top Google executive. There was all kinds of frustrations over the use of Google technology in kind of, military applications that the workers decided, okay, it seems like actually doing a traditional NLRB certified union, while there's some appetite for it, it's just going to be logistically impossible. So we're going to, we're going to kind of take this energy that we have and build this minority union. And they've actually been very successful at organizing around a number of issues. One is just the issue of layoffs, because Google, like a lot of other big tech companies,

have laid off thousands of people since 2023. They've really tried to put pressure on the company to do sort of voluntary buyouts instead of mass layoffs and to get people better severance. When they are laid off, the company says, you know, their changes in this regard have nothing to do with pressure from the union. But suffice it to say,

the two things happen at around the same time. It does seem at the very least that they're elevating these issues and making Google sort of take notice of them. So I think it is fair to say that they are succeeding in some of the traditional ways that unions have kind of elevated issues of importance, even if they're not sitting across from Google at a parking table, negotiating contract every three or four years. That's really impressive because I remember when I first heard about that effort, I was like, well, how much can you really get done that way? But just the, there's a lot of soft power, right, in organizing. Maybe that's even a bad comparison because soft power is so much about. like nation states.

There's many different forms of power that one can marshal, right? And like all workers have power by consolidating our power by, you know, through collective action, we can get something done. And that can be the case even if you're not, you know, going wall to wall and getting every single person. You can still like force some concessions or create some change of culture or create some good result that you can then build on in future campaigns, right? Like maybe one day they do build to be a wall-to-wall union at Google because they're able to show some gains and get more people on board, right?

Yeah, and I think what's interesting about this is going back to our discussion of neutrality and employer opposition, you know, there is a kind of reflex among employers, particularly employers in the United States, to kind of want to kill the union or stop the union at any cost. But I think, you know, in a certain number of workplaces where the workers have entered up unionizing, even the employer didn't want that to happen, you kind of get this sort of grudging respect or this kind of grudging acknowledgement that like, actually, this can be a sort of helpful institution. It's surfacing a lot of issues that we didn't really know existed. It's helping us kind of reach some sort of accommodation or solution that may have been really

hard to, you know, to establish and to get buy-in for. if we didn't have this institution helping us do that. So I think, you know, it does demonstrate that this doesn't have to be like a completely antagonistic relationship that is like feared and loathed by the employer. You know, these things can actually work, you know, obviously in other contexts, auto workers, you know, we've seen this work in, you know, for the benefit of both sides. So it need not be this kind of existential struggle. You know, obviously at times it gets contentious and that's probably necessary.

but it need not always be. Well, it's only an existential struggle when the companies make it one, right? And one of the lessons of the auto workers is that during that period of American history, the companies decided let's have labor peace. Let's stop fighting the union so much. And let's work with that. These workers do have power. Let's work with them.

And maybe we can contain them another way, right? And if you look at the history of the auto workers unions, there's plenty of that. They sort of managed to get them to defend. quiet down in a lot of cases. And the result of that was, you know, some people say that made those unions less radical, but others will say, well, that is part of what guaranteed a good standard of life for auto workers, was that they eventually the company's bent the knee and said, okay, you know what, we'll work with you guys. So it's, it is the companies that decide, you know, how much of a war they want this to be. We have to talk about Starbucks before we finish up.

because it's very interesting that you include them at all in your book about the college educated working class because like, I mean, they are literally fast food workers, right? Like they work, you know, they're at the fucking airport next to the Burger King. Right. And yet at the same time, there's a lot of differences. They, uh, we think of barista as being a more highly skilled occupation. I, I think probably the, the amount of skill it takes to make complicated espresso drinks is maybe high. higher than it takes to run a fry basket. No offense to the wonderful workers at In-N-Out,

who I love your work. But, and also the workforce in American coffee shops is, we do think, oh, yeah, it's a more educated workforce, right? So we do have this presumption. It's more likely to be someone with a college degree. And also, Starbucks has been one of the most successful new unionization efforts at an American company in the last 10 years, like bar none. they have sort of exceeded every expectation in what they've been able to get done.

And so tell me about the dynamics of that effort. Yeah, no, as you say, at first glance, you're not thinking kind of college-educated workers, but it was striking to me. I went out to Buffalo to cover this campaign when it first started in the fall, really the summer of 2021. I guess I showed up there in October for the first time. And, you know, no one knew at the time, of course, how. how far this was going to travel,

even the people organizing those unions in Buffalo thought, well, this will be like a Buffalo city thing, you know. And then, of course, they win two of their first three elections in Buffalo, and immediately it just catches on like fire across the country. And so I realized, as I immediately just start

talking to people who are organizing, it was very much, you know, as you remember, a grassroots effort. You know, a couple of baristas would get together in their store. They'd have a Zoom with someone in Buffalo, person in Buffalo would talk them through, you know, the steps that they took to organize their store and then they'd be off to the races. And so, and every time another Starbucks store, you know, Boston, Arizona,

Florida, Mississippi, every time one of them would file a petition for a union election, I'd try to get on the phone with someone who was involved. And invariably, you know, I wouldn't say all of them, but a large majority were college-educated folks, you know, they all. Many, many times they had been they had volunteered for Bernie Sanders in 2016 or 2020. They had some kind of, you know, activists or, you know, kind of organizing, but very informal. Not, you know, Starbucks would suggest that these were all sort of paid, you know, plants and infiltrators. Very little of that. There was mostly people who just, you know, had gone to college.

They struggled a bit after college. They were trying to find their way. Starbucks had health care benefits, which were still attractive for a lot of people. and, you know, they tended to be, you know, people who felt like you could do something if the situation wasn't going the way you wanted. And so I just start seeing this pattern over and over again, you know, people who who had gone to college, they ended up in this job. They felt like it had gotten worse, you know, particularly since the pandemic. And they felt like they could do something about it. I actually talked in one of the early pieces I wrote and I come back to her in the book to a sociologist named Ruth Milpman.

who gave me this term class, class confidence. You know, there's certain aspects of your experience, your personal experience, whether it's going to college or succeeding in certain things, that just gives you a kind of confidence that you can change your circumstances if you feel like they need to be changed. And I saw that, like, that class confidence, you know, all over the place. And so in the book, I ended up writing about a particular Starbucks in Chicago where they organized.

And they were having a strike one day in like the fall of 22. And I just, you know, I live in Chicago. So I start driving around to different Starbucks locations. And I get there and this store on the north side of Chicago has these very like evocative paper machet Starbucks figures. You know, there's like a mermaid, you know, very, like a big mermaid. And then I have like a very dour-looking lawyer, you know, a corporate lawyer. And I'm like, okay, I got to talk to these guys.

So I pull up in my car and I say, you know, I'm from the New York Times. I'm writing about the campaign. And someone says, well, you got to talk to Teddy. I was like, okay, well, let's go talk to Teddy. And so I started talking to this guy, Teddy, very sweet guy, very expressive eyebrows. That was my first impression. And it turns out Teddy had gone to Grinnell College in Iowa, very, very good liberal arts college. And then he'd won this very prestigious fellowship called the Watson Fellowship, which allowed him to tour the world for a year after college, came back to Chicago, worked at Starbucks for a while while he was going to kind of figure out his next move, as many people have done, you know, for decades.

And then right as he was about to leave and kind of figure out, you know, his post-Starbucks career, the pandemic hits. And then he's just kind of marooned at Starbucks for the next several months. And as he's marooned there, he's just getting madder and matter and matter. And his coworkers are getting more and more frustrated. They're watching this thing blow up in Buffalo and Boston and Florida and in Arizona. And they're like, you know what? We can do this too. So I kind of follow their store and their trajectory over the next few years.

But it's a kind of microcosm of how this thing played out and why they were able to get five, six hundred stores unionized when really no one thought they'd even be able to get the first one. Yeah, but they're still fighting for a contract, right? They have not yet won one. And they've been fighting fighting for a couple years. There actually been glimmers where maybe they'd get one soon. Yes. The company keeps holding them off. And yet it is still one of the most successful efforts.

So let's sort of summarize here. How do you think, you know, we're at this moment of record support for unions, record low union density, and, you know, a labor market that seems worse and worse, people being laid off, companies consolidating. What do you think, what do you take away from this trend that you're seeing for the future of the labor movement? How does this change, you know, work in America going forward? Yeah. So it's hard for me to know if what we're going to see is like a steady growth in unionization or just this kind of energy and frustration bubble up in some other way. But it is 100% clear to me that the status quo will not continue. So maybe we're going to get more union campaigns at white-collar workplaces.

Maybe we're going to get more politicians elected like Zoran Mabani, who was very much a, kind of champion of the folks that were talking about. At the very same time, a sort of Mondani-esque mayor was elected in Seattle, you know, right around the same time. We have, there's a lot of sort of energy bubbling, obviously nationally within the Democratic Party. There are, you know, kind of different convulsions and different workplaces, even if they're not unions per se.

We talked about the minority union at Google. There's a lot of sort of organizing. There's a group called the Tech Workers Coalition, which is a sort of broad, umbrella group that tries to educate tech workers about unionizing and collective action. And they've just, they shared their their kind of newsletter and email list numbers with me over the past few years, you know, and these are years that have not been good for the industry, right? I mean, lots of people laid off, jobs going away.

And their email list has just gone bananas, you know. And so, so yeah, I think it's difficult to know exactly what form this is going to take, whether it's going to kind of rear its head mostly in politics, but then the day. Democratic Party, within primaries, within union elections, but it feels very much like this thing is growing. And I, you know, if I had to guess, I'd say we'd see a little bit of all, all those things. You know, an increase in kind of white collar college grad unions, an increase in support for candidates, you know, probably on the left, like Mom Dani, who are sort of channeling this frustration and anger, a little, you know, kind of activism that's unrelated to unions at workplaces.

I think kind of all of the above is what we're, what we're in for. Yeah. And, and, and, And how do you see, on podcast this year, we got to talk about AI. It's got to come up in every single episode. How do you see that playing a role? Because, look, I'm still very much constitutionally a skeptic about almost everything I'm told about it. I think anything is still possible. But I will note that this is the first technological advance of this size I've ever seen where the pitch is, it's going to take your job. Like literally they're like, hey, we invented this thing.

What does it do? Takes your job. Right. Oh, okay. Why do we build that? Well, too late. We already built it. It's going to happen.

Fuck you. Like, that's a very strange pitch to the American people and the American workforce. And especially to the tech industry itself, right? Where they're like literally tech companies are laying off employees and saying, well, we can replace you with AI. Whether or not that's true or if it's because of interest rates or whatever else, you know, remains to be seen. But that is what they are being told. And so how do you think that affects what happens going forward? Yeah, I mean, the way I would put it is kerosene, you know, kerosene on the fire.

Yeah. I mean, because as I said, we've had this brewing for 15 years now, and we've really started to see it in the data over the last few years, you know, with the kind of elevated unemployment for college grads. And almost all of that uptick in unemployment for college grads, which has happened at much higher rates than anyone else, you know, non-college votes. All of that is pre-AI. So if you take the trends that we've been seeing, which has already led to all this churn and frustration and activism, and you dump, as you say, a sort of job eliminating technology on top of that, it's very hard for me to see how this thing doesn't completely metastasize.

And I think it's interesting in that I will have these conversations with folks, you know, whether they're people at video game companies or tech companies. and they will say, you know, we've been organizing. We had a pretty big group and a growing group, and there's a lot of enthusiasm for trying to unionize or strike potentially. But we always have these people who are like not completely convinced, you know, they still felt like the kind of pull of the old, like we're special. You know, we have this special status. They would never do that to us.

It's all a big misunderstanding. If, you know, any, you know, if there were any feelings hurt, And in the last year, those people are taking a look at AI and going, oh. Okay. So I think it's, you know, we've already had this sort of growing movements, this growing energy. And what the AI doing is taking the undecided and making them decided. Yeah. And it's, you can really, you really see it.

You know, just in reporting on, you know, Amazon had a few rounds of layoffs late, you know, in the fall and then early this year. And I've, you know, done some reporting on Amazon and written about the way. that they're implementing AI and the way the engineers are being asked to use AI. And you have a lot of folks who just never would have been the, you know, the people to get involved, never been the people to take the lead in organizing. And I have these conversations with these engineers and they're just like, okay, yeah, I'm, I'm done.

Whatever you want me to do, you want me to sign something, you want me to turn out for something, I'm there. Yeah. I'm, you know, I've given up. Well, because what the history of the labor movement tells us is you can only push people so far, right? And what happened in the late 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, it impoverished and oppressed people so much that, like, they fought back.

And you sort of are starting to see the bosses in this country do the same thing again. I mean, you know, they're not like sending people down in a coal mine at quite the same rate. But, you know, by by taking away their livelihoods and doing so gleefully and telling people, oh, no, you're, we were actually wasting money on you. actually useless to us, like, people are not going to respond positively to that. And I feel like, you know, the capitalist classes in this country are maybe pushing us towards a greater conflict. You know, does that feel like that's the trend that you've been covering? I think so. And I think one, you know, you alluded to this in passing, but I think it's a really important point that

also points to an analogy between today and 100 years or so ago, which is we, the labor movement it started as the kind of craft movement, right? We had these sort of skilled artisans and they all wanted their own little guilds and they didn't really, you know, the skilled mechanics didn't want to associate with the unskilled labors. And, you know, the big innovation in the labor movement in the 30s was to a shift toward industrial unionism, you know, where like everyone in this industry, everyone of this company, we're all going to lock arms and kind of go at this together. And I think that's, you know, to me, the big shift that we've seen in the past five years or so, six years, is this kind of, you know, people don't know the term, but is this shift from, from craft,

you know, unionism to industrial unionism? Yeah, and again, I use that, you know, loosely, but, you know, we've had this, you know, in the past where, you know, we'd say, okay, fine, the testers can have their union, but, you know, engineers like us, we don't really need it. And just in the past few years, we've just shifted to like, okay, everyone in this industry needs it, you know, because no one is safe. And that to me is, you know, when you see that kind of change happened, it's usually a decent indicator that something is afoot, you know,

something big is happening. That actually happened in, you know, organizing video games because the Writers Guild has looked a couple times at organizing video games in different, and in some cases has, right? But what ended up happening was rather than just organizing the writers

who are just a small number on every particular video game. Well, the CWA was doing entire studios. And like, yeah, of course, that's more powerful than, you know, because the CEOs, they're like, oh, people write the video games, who gives a fuck? You know, like, you're only talking about it, maybe a dozen people. Well, I don't want to say how many, but, you know, a small number of people who are game versus when it's the entire workforce, right? How much more power you have.

This has been, I'm so happy that you're charting this change. It's like truly a big shift under our feet and one that I try to encourage people to think about positively, you know, when, when, because it is a really rough time for so many people in this country. But it does also mean that like the fundamentals of the job market of the economy are changing. And we can we could see a different response from people in the future, you know, that like there is an opportunity that comes out of this for maybe the revitalization of the labor movement. I'm curious if you have any final thoughts to give folks who are, you know, maybe college educated themselves and going, man, I fucking hate my job. What do they what do they do? Yeah, you know, it's funny. It's funny that you say that it can be an optimistic message because, you know, when I, when I reported the book and typically people are very frustrated and angry and that's why they're doing these things. But you do get the sense from people that they also felt very much empowered. They had a real sense of the agency and purpose as they were trying to organize these unions and, you know, trying to work out, you know, come to a new understanding with their employers.

Nothing feels better than a collective fight, you know, a fight with your colleagues. Nothing feels better. And, you know, it's, I think it's not wrong to say that, you know, as dark as the landscape looks at times, particularly when you throw AI into the picture, there is a, you know, there's an element of optimism, I think, that you can kind of glean from this. In fact, one of a, a writer I very much admire, Kurt Anderson, I asked him to, to blurb the book, and he was very kind and blurbed it. And he actually picked up on, you know, he said it's actually surprisingly optimistic story. And, you know, it wasn't like front of mind as I was writing the book,

but I was like, yeah, you know, he's kind of right. You know, I think people do feel like they can kind of have more agency and kind of control their fate a little more than maybe they felt they could after just feeling put upon for several years at work. So, you know, I'd suggest that, you know, that as dark as it feels like and as pessimistic as a lot of college-educated folks feel, it's it's never hopeless. You know, there's always, there's always something to be done. Yeah, especially if you have solidarity with folks who maybe have a little bit less power than you in the workplace, right?

That like that kind of consciousness, build for yourself and that'll raise everybody, even the folks who are not college educator working in other fields in your company, right? I'm so, it's been such a thrill to talk to you about this. The name of the book is Mutiny, the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. It's out April 7th. You can, of course, get a copy.

our special bookshop, factually. Factuallypod.com slash books. I believe you can pre-order there as well. But where else can people find your work on the internet, Noam? Yeah. If you go to, if you Google me, Noam Shriver, or go to New York Times.com, it'll pull up a link to every story I've ever written for the New York Times. And you can find all my work, all my work there.

Thank you so much, man. It's been really wonderful having you. Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for engaging with me on this stuff. Well, thank you once again to Noem for coming on the show. once again that URL factuallypod.com slash books. Every book you purchase there will support not just this show but your local

bookstore as well. Of course, if you want to support the show directly, that's an even better way to do it. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Cone. Over five bucks a month. It gets you every episode ad free for 15 bucks a month. I'll read your name in the credits and put it in the credits of every single one of my video monologues. This week I want to thank Rebecca

Beah, Missc Bits, Serious Dinosauri, Grant Wassell, Laura Bell, Christina Mendes, Kevin Sosa, Robin Dunlap, and Nikki Pods, Sean Garrison, Raghav Kauschik, Ashley Molina Diaz, and ask if you would like me to read your name or silly username at the end of the show. Once again, that URL, patreon.com slash Adam Kanover. If you want to come see me on the road, Hartford, Connecticut, Sacramento, California, La Jolla, California,

Chicago, Illinois, taping on April 18th. And in May, Kansas City, Missouri, head to Adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producers, Sam Raubman and Tony Wilson. and everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum podcast.

Hey, everyone. This is Natalie. And this is Charlie. We're from the podcast Exploration Live. It's really funny. It's really, really good. It's really, really very good. And now we have a YouTube channel to go with it.

That's exactly right, Natalie. You can watch full video episodes of our podcast Exploration Live at YouTube.com slash Exploration Live podcast. That means that in addition to the audio component, you're also getting a video component. Exactly. Where you're seeing our reactions, what kind of clothes we're wearing. You know, and there's a whole suite of dynamics and physical expressions that you can really only get from a full video.

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