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Foreign
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It's Monday, April 6, 2026 from Peachfish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca and you know I have a very nuanced or possibly muddled view of unions. A cop to muddled if you want to call it nuanced after you hear me out, do so please. I'll take the compliments. So I've been in good unions, I've been in bad unions. I'll be specific. Good union was NPR. You'd work for 12 hours and they'd pay you for 12 hours. And the last four hour chunk of that would be time and a half. You wrote down what you honestly work as they assigned you to work. Let's say they said, mike, go to the World Series. And you'd show up, you got to show up around 4:30 batting practice and this thing goes until midnight. And then you'd go home and you file or go to hotel room and then you'd file for Morning Edition. I'd say you, but I'm clearly talking about me. You could probably infer that from the use of the word Mike. So what is that? That's maybe a 4pm to 4am 4:30 to 4:30 gig. They also pay you for travel, but I'm not even going to soak them for that. That's 12 hours and you get paid for it. Now when you do the Olympics, it's overseas, so there's some sort of set rate fee. And there was also a contingency where especially someone like me who'd always be working very long hours during key sporting events, they'd say you want a personal services contract which will pay you a flat fee and you don't have to work out those timesheets. And, and if I did say yes, it wasn't taking, I wouldn't take a worse deal. But the reason that I as the unionized employee would have the leverage to be offered that deal was because the union guarantee I would get paid time and a half for anything over 12, I think double time into the 13th hour. Great. Union wrote down what you worked. They paid you for what you worked then. Before then I was in the union for WNYC and it seemed to me that their main job was not getting terrible people fired. So there were engineers who were violent, possibly mentally off and they, one of these engineers was dismissed. But of course the union agitated to get the engineer back and then the engineer attacked a person. Great, great job. Union. Also, most of my earliest years at WNYC was working as a seven dollar an hour intern and doing the work of the assistant producers so they wouldn't have to hire one. I understand why it would break the bank if you had to have that many people on staff. Not a great union. And then later on I was with a union that founded itself as I was there with my last employer. And I thought that that was mostly about the feeling, the vibe of a union rather than the material benefits to the workers. But it's not just about me. It's about the broader picture of unions in America. So the reason I'm talking all about this is that that is going to be a two part interview that I do today and tomorrow about a really interesting book and a really good reporter, Noam Scheiber. And the book is called Mutiny the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. And especially in Tom, his interview, I do give him a hard time because while he is a very good reporter, I take some objection to some of the framing of how the New York Times places an importance or almost a enthusiastic cheerleading or a reading of the story of unions in America today as one of an exciting momentum where it doesn't necessarily have to be read like that. But I did read all of Gnomes book and I give you so many of my thoughts with Noam. But before that, actually after that, this is how the show works. I should know this by now. We will do a spiel. It is not from this year, but it is inspired by this movie that came out called Goat which is about a goat that plays basketball. And like so many animated movies, you got your animal doing human things and many jokes about the animal being human. B Story, classic example you will hear in my spiel. I talk about movies like Cars B Story and planes and ants and there are a lot of jokes about what ants do and they're similar to what humans do. And then we as humans laugh. Well, anyway, I don't know. I didn't even remember I did this spiel but somehow I came across it thinking about the latest movie about the basketball playing goat.
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You're the owner of the thorns.
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Seeing as we haven't won a game
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all season, you might be exactly what
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this team needs right now.
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You're signing a go. Hey.
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And this weird thing happened to me. I had no memory of doing it, but I laughed. Oh, did I laugh. Self critique. It took a little while to get to the point. Maybe. I guess that's the setup. I knew where the setup was going. That's how I found it. I found it while looking for specific search terms but man, did I laugh. And I can only surmise this guy talking right here. He has my exact sense of humor, and I hope yours too. But first, Noam Shriver, author of the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. About four years ago, the New York Times Noam Scheiber wrote an article titled the Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. Subhead said, since the Great Recession, the college educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they're helping to unionize them. The story was eye opening for me, mostly because it gave me a lot of the economic fundamentals informing this drive. And now what Shiver has done is he's fleshed it out, that part about unionization. He's met the union leaders, he's lived with them, he's chronicled their fight and to some extent their success, but not to every extent. Now he's out with a new book called Mutiny to the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. Noam, welcome to the gist.
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Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
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Are you primarily a labor reporter or an economics reporter who writes about labor?
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Ooh, good question. I mean, I started my career writing about economics. My first book was about the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession and the financial crisis.
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You said it was bad.
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Inadequate, yes. Not success.
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What's it look like now?
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I think we're still living with the consequences, to be honest, including a president that response probably helped elect. But yeah, so I do come at this from an economics direction, but was have basically been the Times kind of chief labor and workplace reporter for the past ten years or so. So really try to understand work as much about the sociology and anthropology of work as the economics of work.
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That was the word I was going to use. This book is a lot of sociology, but it is informed by the economic condition. And you lay it out to me, this is the most important thing because economics, macroeconomics drives our reality and then it gets filled in with how we live now and attitudes of the day and examples of sociology. Of course they're interrelated. So give me the economic picture and how did things change from what we had been told? I'm in my 50s, you're a bit younger, but both of us growing up, you got to go to college because college will increase your life earnings by. And then they would have a multiple. And maybe over the years, years the multiple got a little bit lower, but that happened as more people went to college. So when 12% of the population was going to college of Course, it was a pot of gold. And now that it's, you know, 36% going to college, it's, you know, a little less gold. But just give me the realities of college and how that changed during the time you're chronicling.
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Yeah, so, like you, I went when I graduated from college, it was a great deal. You know, I graduated from college in 1998. You could argue that was the best year in the history of the world to graduate from college. You know, we had a booming stock market. They were handing out, like, equity and startups. Like, as soon as you got your degree, you know, it was like an idiot.
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You go into journalism.
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Yes, exactly. So labor market was super tight. Yeah. So there are all kinds of lucrative things that I could have done. I did none of them. But still, if you were so inclined to do a lucrative thing, it was not very hard to do. But within a few years, that really did shift. So my book is about the generation of people who graduated from college beginning right after the Great recession, sort of 2009, 10, all the way up through this coming May. So I think of this as kind of one relatively coherent generation. Obviously, lots of different people and different interests and different stories, but in economic and sociological terms, a lot of things that bind them together. And one of the things that binds them together is the thing that you alluded to, which is they were probably given the hardest sell of any generation about why they need to go to college. Everyone from their parents to the presidents, Bill Clinton, Obama, talking about how a college is absolutely essential in the global economy, they did the most of any generation to prepare for college. Whether you look at homework or AP classes, the number of people taking AP classes increases like tenfold between the 80s and the 2000 and tens. I mean, it just explodes, as you say, more of them than ever went to college. We just had a huge increase in the number of people going to college. And all this was happening at precisely the moment when a college degree starts becoming less valuable as an investment than it had been in decades. And so we just have this huge gap open up between the expectations of this generation that was just given such a hard sell and had worked so hard to get there. And then the reality of what life was like on the other side. And it's in that gap where my story happens and where, you know, everything around us is happening, whether it's in the political realm, you know, people being radicalized in their politics, to unionizing, to striking, to just generally kind of picking fights with their employers, even if it's not a kind of all out union campaign or a strike.
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So I think Quiet quitting.
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Yeah, quiet quitting. All this stuff. Yes. Kind of workplace activism, you know, we don't like the fact that you're working for ICE or whatever. So all these things I think are really undergirded by this tectonic shift in the value of a college degree. At a time when, as I say, everyone was told that this is what they have to do and they, and they did it. You know, they dutifully followed, followed the instructions.
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Other things going on, not just the college degree got worthless. I want to ask you about that in a second. But the college graduate who took a lower paying job, which has always happened, that used to be a decent enough life choice. And then, and I don't know if you know why this change, but it radically did change, didn't it?
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It did change, yeah. The New York Fed, which I lean on a lot in this book for data, has this great data set. They actually stopped releasing it maybe two, three years ago, but they had it kind of through the night from the 90s through the late 2010s and it showed underemployed college grads with good jobs. So that meant you're in a job, you graduated from college, but you're in a job that doesn't require a degree. Is it a good paying job or a bad paying job? And up until about the early 2000s, there were a lot of people who were, you know, graduating from college in a job that didn't require a degree, but still making really good, good money, doing well for themselves. You know, insurance agents, real estate people,
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almost everyone in sales, yeah, everyone in sales.
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People doing kind of bookkeeping functions, you know, financial planning, things like that. A whole variety of good jobs that you could have even if it wasn't, strictly speaking, a college degree wasn't necessary. And that number really starts to nosedive around 2003, 2004. And at the same time the people in jobs for which they're overqualified that are really low paying, that shoots up. So if you look at their lines, the lines just like start going in the wrong direction. The low paying non degree job starts increasing and the high paying ones starts dropping. And that really tracks with like a lot of the other data that we see in this time period. But it's, I think it's a really telling one.
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But there was also, I just think of it logically, go to college, what a premium. Well, part of the reason there was a premium is the rarity of it. So if you're one of 11 people in the job force who have this degree, you're going to be more valued and paid higher. If you're one of three people, you're not. There is just an essential illogic to it. Did the New York Fed, or my favorite, the St. Louis Fed or anyone else ever try to disentangle this phenomenon of rarity? And then there's the other phenomenon of just how many jobs in the economy can the economy take that require a college degree? So sorry for that, sidetrack. But did anyone try to disentangle the uniqueness and rarity aspect from the remuneration of how valuable the degree was?
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Yeah, absolutely. You're 100% right to put your finger on this, there's both a supply side story, you know, more college grads out there and a demand side story, just less need for them. As we got into automation, software, AI and then gen AI on the supply side, you're completely right. In fact, what we see is after the Great Recession, you know, the job market's terrible and so what do people do? They go to college or they get graduate degrees. So we have this huge increase from kind of the low 30s into the upper 30% of people going to college getting a degree. And there's no question that, that clearly, as you say, it's a supply and demand proposition. If you now have many more people with degrees to choose from, you're not as desperate. You know, it's a buyer's market, right? Not, not a seller's market. The other wrinkle that happens on the supply side, which I think is really important, is like quality of the major, the quality of the degree. So it used to be kind of in the 80s and 90s that it's not like going to Harvard was the exact same as going to the University of Florida or Arkansas or wherever, but the degrees pretty much tracked. There wasn't a huge amount of differentiation between people with college degrees. Starting early 2000s and really continuing for the last 20 years, you start to see a lot of differences depending on the major and the type of degree. In particular, we had a huge increase in the number of people going to like basically non competitive public universities. So not the University of Florida or the University of Texas, not the flag,
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not the flagship of a state, but
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not even the second or third tier, but the University of Texas at Brownsville, just these obscure remote branch outposts of large state university systems. And that combined with for profit colleges, also a big increase in people getting for profit degrees. Does start to really weigh, you know, so across the board, on average the numbers have come down, the market has softened. But you do start to see a lot of differentiation between the people going to elite schools or you know, really, you know, top tier research, public research universities and the people in pretty obscure non competitive public schools and for profit colleges. So that starts to matter a lot too.
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So listen, there's definitely graduates of UTexas, Abilene U, Texas, Galveston, just throwing out the UT system, ones I know of that are kind of obscure, that are great and geniuses and everyone want them. But it does seem to me that the for profit college graduate, the vast majority of them and the students that go to tertiary quadrantary tier colleges, they're the exact kind of student that I don't want to say shouldn't be going to college. But there is a mismatch. They're graduating with a degree. Except for time, the intellectual and academic work has been proven to be almost a non barrier to get a degree. It's no longer a signaling mechanism and it no longer actually trained these people up for the job force like college used to. So that to me is totally logical.
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Yeah, I mean we could debate it. I mean I think there is some interesting academic research that shows that kind of at the margins, which is as close as you can come to kind of the natural experiment here. You take someone who goes and just gets into UT Abilene versus doesn't that, you know, and those people look pretty similar in terms of their qualifications and how they fare on standardized tests. But that the one that does go to the four year school and gets the degree does have some, some additional skill that enables them to do well in a job or the labor market. So.
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Right, but enough to make up for tuition, which may be in a UT system and enough to, to make up for the four years that you weren't in the workforce and developing skills. I don't know.
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I agree. It's a, it's a close call. I'm just saying it's not right.
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No, you're right.
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We think there's, it's adding something. It's not adding a lot, but it's adding something. But I think, you know, the phenomenon that I try to get at in the book is the gap between expectations and reality. So if you took out these loans, you know, you were told by everyone in your high school and your extended family and the president that you had to go to college, you then did go to college, you graduated, you extended yourself financially and then you get out of school. And it turns out all you can do is get a job at a Starbucks or an Apple store. Well, you're pretty pissed off about that. So you were told one story, and then the reality that you discover upon graduating is something else. And so whether or not had you done the math, it wouldn't have penciled out or would have penciled out basically the way that it turned out to happen. The reality, the expectations that were built up in the process set you up for a pretty crushing disappointment. And I think we're seeing the effects of that disappointment relative to expectations.
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So the answer for the characters in your book, which makes it a compelling book, though not the answer for everyone, is unionizing. Is that the answer? Will that make up for the dashed gap between promises and expectations?
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Yeah, I mean, look, I think unionizing is one of the answers. I would put it more broadly in kind of taking some kind of collective action. And I think that collective action can mean unionizing, it can mean striking if you're already unionized, it can mean just like kind of hectoring your bosses at all hands meetings. It can mean circulating petitions, it can mean voting for politicians that are pretty sympathetic to this. I mean, we just had this election in New York where Zoran Mamdadi got a lot of sort of downwardly mobile, college educated folks to vote for him. And he is in turn, you know, kind of representing their anxieties and their needs. Right. Whether it's, whether it's rent, you know, freezes or free buses, you know, public subsidized grocery stores, you know. So I think I would put it more broadly as kind of collective action. And that can kind of take a political form, it can take a workplace form, it can take an explicitly sort of unionizing form. But I think we have seen just a general growth in this kind of collective action. And I think we're going to see a lot more of it, you know, as we go forward.
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But the people that you cover, and I did the anti journalistic, don't hook the audience thing of starting big with economics instead of people. You correctly start with characters. So we follow the characters, the characters have a quest. We get to know them, we get to like them. The quest is to unionize. I want to get into some of their quests. You quite smartly talk about Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, we all know these companies, they all make a lot of money. Everything's great there. But the question is, is unionization? Is that the answer? Does that not just address the feelings of betrayal, but actually the material circumstances of the People you covered.
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Yeah, great question. I think you actually need to separate it into. Into the two parts that you just alluded to. Does it cover the sort of psychological disappointment of having one set of expectations, then encountering this reality and sort of being really put upon by this reality? I think it does. It is something that feels like it gives you agency. I think if you have gone to college, one thing that college teaches you is to have agency, to figure stuff out, to work the system. I quote a sociologist in my book who coined this term class confidence. And I think college gives you this kind of class confidence. You can kind of go online and read the NLRA and kind of quickly understand what your legal rights are. And then when an employer tries to tell you you can't do this, you're like, ah, I actually can. I'm citing section 7. I can do that. So I think for a lot of the folks that I talk to, not categorically, but most that I talked to who were involved in these union campaigns, it was a very empowering thing. You know, they really felt a sense of agency at their workplace, probably for the first time since they'd worked there. And some of them had worked there for seven, eight, ten years. So I do think for the sort of emotional piece of it, for the frustration, it actually is a very empowering thing. On the material circumstances, I think the story is much more mixed. You know, the Starbucks folks, they have unionized more than 500 stores, and yet Starbucks, how many? More than 500?
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Out of. How many?
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Oh, sorry, yeah, Exactly. Out of 10,000. You know, so we're still talking about, you know, 5% of the.5% of the stores. So. Yeah, and they have yet to negotiate a contract. I think the two sides got pretty close at a certain point, and the union members decided that they just wanted to hold out for a higher wage increase, which obviously is their rights. But I think it's been much more mixed. On the material circumstances, I think one group of workers that I write about is a group of testers, quality assurance testers at video game studios owned by Microsoft. They now have a contract. It's a pretty good contract. They got some good increases in wages. They got some protections on AI. Obviously, AI for everyone else looms over there, their livelihood, because they worry that, you know, in the future agents will just play these games and find the bugs and eliminate them. So they did pretty well for themselves. There's an Apple store in a suburb of Baltimore that I kind of focus on. They, you know, I, I think that's Actually a good case study to look at because when you just look at their wages, they got effectively a guarantee of a 10% increase across three years, 4% in the first year, 3% in each of the subsequent years. Now, Apple is a very rich company. They can and very likely will just turn around and give everybody at all Apple stores that same increase. So they will have essentially run in place. But they did get a whole variety of other protections that other people at Apple stores don't get. For example, Apple, as I write about in the book over the past 10, 15 years, has relied much more heavily on kind of seasonal workers, temps. And a lot of workers who are full time employees there have this anxiety that they're kind of being phased out and Apple's going to a much more kind of flexible, contingent workforce. Well, they got a provision of their contract that says no more than 25% of all the people in the store can be temps or contingent folks. Which is, I think, something that addresses a real material need and also addresses their anxieties and their frustrations over the loss of power. So it's clearly a mixed bag. But I think, you know, in the case of that Apple Store, something concrete that they can post point to as a, as a step forward.
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The Apple Store character, is her name Shia?
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Kaya.
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Yeah, Kaya. Yeah. I liked her a lot. She was very sympathetic. Describe her a little bit to me.
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Yeah, Kaya grew up in Baltimore County. She, she's black. She went to a, a public high school in Baltimore county that really put a lot of emphasis on going to college. The kids in that school, as soon as they got their acceptance letters, they were invited to post them on the wall of the front office. And they had this program which a lot of schools have called avid, which helps prepare people to take the SAT and to write college essays and entrance and applications. So it was a school that really emphasized the need to go to college. Her parents also had gone to college. I don't think they had graduated, but they had gone to college. And they thought it was a very important thing to do, so they really stress the importance of doing it. She actually initially went to a small college in Maryland that was a small liberal arts college. It was very expensive and kind of remote and just didn't even though it kind of fit.
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Was it St. John's St. John's yeah, the great Books program. You don't learn math. You read Aristotle writing about math.
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Exactly.
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Sounds good to me, but kind of
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really it looks the part too. You know, it really looks like College out of a movie set. But it didn't, it didn't work for her. So she ends up going to Towson University in Baltimore. She gets a degree in communication.
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Would you say one of those Texas Abilene type colleges or a little better?
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No, Towson is actually decent state school.
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Yeah, I think you're right.
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It's not the University of Maryland, but they, you know, if you look at the people who, who graduate from Towson, their median wage is about the median for a college grad nationally. So they're doing okay. They have a lot of people who go to nursing, so that may boost their overall averages since nurses are paid pretty well. But yeah, decent. Maybe not a flagship, but a solid state school. And she gets a degree in communications. She works at the Apple store while she's in college for, you know, works part time. She applies to a lot of, you know, dozens and dozens of jobs. She wants to go into sort of professional training or marketing. Just doesn't get any traction. So having kind of struck out, ends up taking a full time job at the Apple store in 2018, kind of the summer of 2018, right after she graduates and is just there, you know, through the pandemic, you know, for several years, and is, you know, it's actually Apple has a number of jobs that are kind of cool. You know, the job that she did was called a creative and that's where you teach these kind of free sessions where you can kind of learn to do different features. You know, you can learn to edit films on your laptop or learn how to produce a podcast on your laptop. So it's kind of a cool job. But she just found that over the years, the things that she liked about that job were slowly disappearing and she was gradually just getting pulled more and more into kind of a basic sales job that wasn't what she felt like she signed up for. So in addition to kind of not having her ambitions coming out of college fulfilled, the job that seemed like a decent compromise at the beginning of 2018 was gradually kind of becoming degraded in her eyes. And the frustration was building and building.
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And tomorrow Noem is back to discuss more of his reporting and reportage. The differences there in and the book Mutiny the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. It'll be a humdinger. Please join us for that. And now the spiel. So all these kids movies, I'd say about a third of all animated movies are based on this premise. What if it were a world of blank? What if it were a world of bees? Events of cars, of racing slugs, of talking toys, of monsters, of sharks, of farm animals, of clownfish, of penguins, of rats, deaths, of Scientologists. Oh, you didn't get the subtext of Osmosis Jones. Anyway, that's what they do. They get the writers in the room, they say, we're going to make a movie about bees. We're going to call it B movies. Think about 100 associations you have with bees. Then they think about all those possible jokes. Now think about everything you know about humans. Okay, you do that automatically. See where the overlay is? There's a chance for humor. Anything where there's an overlap between the subject of your movie and what we as people do every day. For instance, in human. In English, we humans say, gonna crawl into a fetal position. But if you were an ant, you'd say, otherwise, I would just curl up
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in a lava position and weep.
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Which is a pretty similar joke to this from cars. It's an old car talking to a younger car. But, oh, he was a persistent little bugger for a two cylinder. Finally I said, so humans have TiVo
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bees, we have HiVo, but it's a disease. It's a horrible, horrible disease.
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How about when a bee picks out his clothes?
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Yellow, black, yellow, black, yellow, black, yellow, black, yellow, black, yellow, black. Oh, black and yellow. Yeah, let's shake it up a little
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because that's their color scheme. So a lot of these are just cheap puns. Not that high. Object to cheap puns. The very title of the movie, B movie is kind of a cheap pun. But you know, movies like cars, they get a little more imaginative. They really get into the mind. So if cars existed, how would the world look? Oh, yeah, I guess clouds would be shaped like cars, things like that. And then they do the cheap puns also. So this gets to my movie. Here's my idea. What if it were a world of horses? So that's my idea. Wait a minute, Mike, that's terrible. No, no, you got to listen to the next part of the idea. A movie based on like all these other movies where we ask, what if it were a world of horses and only horses ruled the world? Horses went to work wherever, in offices. But the movie was made from the perspective of. Of cows. So it would be about, what if it were a world of horses? But it would be cows projecting their value systems onto horses. So there'd be nothing about quadrupedism, because that would just be taken as a given. But all the jokes would be about things like letting people ride on. You want a ride. Have a ride. We're jockeying for position, right? And riding crops, not chewing one's cud. And like this need to go fast. There'd be hysterical jokes about how everyone wants to go really fast and not not having four stomachs but only one stomach. And silks. Oh my God. With the cows make excellent jokes about how horses wear silks. Now here's the thing. This might not fly, so I have a even more meta idea, and this is Charlie Kaufman esque, but you could make a movie about a moviemaker who spends his whole life trying to greenlight a horse movie about cows. So it'd be my story, me pitching the horse movie as done by cows to confused people or at least a really weirded out podcast audience. And that's it for today's show. Cory War produces the gist, Kathleen Sykes runs the gist list, Ben Astaire is our booking producer and Jeff Craig runs our socials. Michelle Pesca oversees it all Benevolently improve and thanks for listening.