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- [00:02]
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- [00:28]
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- [01:11]
Miles Bryan
Welcome to the gray area. I'm VOX reporter and producer Miles Bryan. I'm filling in for Sean today. My guest is New York Times labor reporter Noam Scheiber. He's written a new book called the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. In the book, Noam argues that over the last 20 years or so, college grads prospects have fallen way short of what they were promised and that's pushed them left on economics. I asked Noam to come on the show to talk about his book. What exactly are college graduates mutinying against? And how could an alliance between white collar and blue collar workers transform American politics? Noam Scheiber, welcome to the gray area. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [01:51]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah. So I am a reporter with the New York Times. I cover workers in the workplace. Over the years, I've covered a whole variety of workers. Blue collar, white collar, service workers, workers at fast food places, tech workers, professional athletes, lawyers, doctors, the whole, the whole gamut.
- [02:09]
Miles Bryan
And you've also written a book about college educated workers, specifically. It's called the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class. You argue in this book that over the last 20 years or so, college grads, economic circumstances have pushed them to the left on economics. Who are these college graduates revolting against and why?
- [02:30]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah, so the book is really about the generation of people who graduated from College beginning in 2008, nine, right during and after the Great Recession. And this was a generation of folks who probably did more to prepare to go to college than any generation in history. They went to school for longer days, they did more homework, they took way more AP classes. So the number of people taking AP classes increases like tenfold between the 80s and the 2010s. And then more of them than ever went to college. They took on record amount of debt to do that, thinking that this would be the key, you know, their ticket to the upper middle class. But then when they got out of college, they found that the return on their degree was stagnating or even dropping. And so the gap between sort of everything that they were told to do and everything they expected to get out of going to college, and then the reality that they found when they got out of college was very frustrated, and I argue in the book even radicalizing. And it turns out that even as the country kind of recovered from the Great Recession, you know, the job market repaired itself. A lot of other people did fine. Recent college grads never quite recovered. Median wages for recent college grads were still like 10% below the 20012 levels. As late as, like, 2017, 2018, employment rates were still down. And all of this was, of course, before AI. And we've seen the impact that that's having on recent college grads. So it's really been a kind of almost uninterrupted stream of bad news for recent college grads since 2008. And, yeah, as you say in the book, I argue that that has kind of reshaped how they look at the world, and particularly on economics. Their views on things like socialism have become much more supportive. They've become much more pro union. They've actually organized much more in the workplace. And I think we're seeing all of that kind of play out in this moment.
- [04:21]
Miles Bryan
So. So the revolt is a revolt against American capitalism, a revolt against the system they thought they were being born into, had a right to, but then has kind of shut its doors on them.
- [04:34]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah, I think, you know, there are kind of more literal and less literal ways to interpret the revolt. Certainly, I think you're right. The revolt is against the system. You see a lot of disillusionment with kind of authority figures, with institutions. You know, if you poll them about big business and banks, they are very down on these things. But more literally, I think the revolt is against their own employers. And, you know, I write about a number of confrontations between workers and their employees in the book, specifically at companies like Starbucks and Apple and Microsoft. These are folks who. Who joined these companies. In many cases, they did jobs that they weren't super excited about. You know, whether it was a barista at Starbucks, someone working at an Apple store in retail, or a video game tester. At a big game studio at Microsoft. So they're in these jobs. They're not the jobs that they kind of expected that they would have after college. And, you know, as the wages kind of stagnate and the working conditions get worse and worse, they get frustrated, and ultimately they decide to unionize in many cases.
- [05:39]
Miles Bryan
Right. And I want to get to that story and some of the people you wrote about. I just want to ask you one more question about how we're thinking about this group of people. There is a comparison you've made in your reporting, in the article that comes from the book in the New York Times to another famous book about college graduates, David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, which is published in 2000. And in that book, he termed the now famous, infamous term bohemian bourgeois, or bobo. And these were college grads who liked, like, funky artsy stuff. That's what made them bohemian. But they were, like, upwardly mobile economically. They saw themselves as the managers of tomorrow. They like free trade. They like balanced budgets. You know, they're maybe a little skeptical of the Teamsters or other unions. How do your graduates kind of relate to that term, to Bobo? It's like, how have they sort of flipped the script there?
- [06:37]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah, so you're absolutely right. The kind of bohemian bourgeois was this idea that, you know, this. It really kind of epitomized the 90s. I want to. You know, because you had this moment when tech was becoming ascendant and we were doing all these free trade deals, and it felt like globalization was in. And all these folks kind of benefited from those trends economically, but they still kind of clung to this sort of bohemian sensibility, this bohemian aesthetic. You know, Brooks talks about how, like, they like kind of reclaimed wood furniture and they like fabrics that were kind of nubby and, you know, so this whole bohemian aesthetic appealed to them even as they were basically, you know, what,
- [07:12]
Miles Bryan
the frayed sweater and the Volvo.
- [07:13]
Noam Scheiber
Exactly.
- [07:14]
Miles Bryan
They're doing well. Yeah.
- [07:15]
Noam Scheiber
Yes. Even though their economics were very much kind of pretty moderate centrist, even kind of neoliberal, I guess would be the epithet that we use now. So the folks I write with, there was a moment where I toyed with calling them pro bows, the proletarian bourgeoisie.
- [07:32]
Miles Bryan
Hey, that's good.
- [07:32]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah. I didn't want to kind of have that debate completely on David Brooks's terms, even though I really admire that book. But, yeah, so these are folks who actually have kind of some of the aesthetics of the bourgeois. You know, they have these sleek devices. You know, they drink, like, very fancy coffee. They Watch, you know, streaming shows and kind of peak tv, you know, highbrow dramas. And yet their bank accounts do not look like the bank accounts of the bobos. You know, they have typically tons of debt from college. They're working in jobs that makes it harder to service that debt. They are not, you know, these corporate lawyers and tech bosses. They are, you know, the people working at Apple retail and Starbucks. So, yeah, very much almost the mirror image, you know, people who kind of, on some level, aesthetically and sociologically, like, present as bourgeois, but their politics and their economics are very much of, like, the proletariat.
- [08:27]
Miles Bryan
One of the characters you've wrote about in the book, a guy named Teddy Hoffman. I was gonna call him an inverted bobo, but I like pro bow.
- [08:34]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah, we can go with probo.
- [08:35]
Miles Bryan
We can go with probo. Give me a bio of Teddy. Who is he? Where did he come from? Yeah, give me a little bit of a story.
- [08:43]
Noam Scheiber
I was covering this organizing campaign at Starbucks, started in 2021, and by 22, it kind of exploded across the country. Like, hundreds of Starbucks stores were trying to unionize. And in the fall of 22, there was a strike at about a hundred of these stores around the country because the bargaining had just kind of stalled out. So I got my car in Chicago. There were, you know, a handful of stores in Chicago that were on strike. I started driving around from store to store, and I got to the store on the north side, and I saw these very kind of evocative paper mache puppets. One of the Starbucks mermaid, you know, the iconic Starbucks mermaid. I was like, okay, I have to talk to these people. So I get out and I introduce myself as a Times reporter to the first worker I saw. And this worker said, oh, you have to go talk to Teddy. So I said, okay, great, I'll go out, talk to Teddy. And I walked up to this guy, and he had this beard and these very evocative eyebrows. I remember. And it was like in the upper 20s in Chicago in late November. He was wearing, like, a jean jacket. And I was like, okay, this is a hardy. This is a hardy person, if nothing else. And so we started talking. I asked him about himself, and he told me he had gone to Grinnell College. He had graduated in 2014, which is
- [09:45]
Miles Bryan
a fancy, expensive, prestigious liberal arts college.
- [09:48]
Noam Scheiber
Prestigious liberal arts college in Iowa. And then he had done incredibly well there after college. He had kind of toured the world. He had gone to New Zealand and South Africa.
- [09:58]
Miles Bryan
He got the Watson Fellowship.
- [09:59]
Noam Scheiber
So, yes. So I asked him, you know, were you Just kind of backpacking around. He's like, no, I got this fellowship. And it turned out it was this fancy fellowship called the Watson Fellowship. And all this was like a little jarring because I didn't entirely expect you, graduate of Grinnell and someone who'd received this fancy fellowship to be at Starbucks.
- [10:14]
Miles Bryan
Hang on, I want to pause you there because I want to take a beat on his job at Starbucks, which really struck this part of the book, really struck me. You know, you write about Teddy in this person who seems pretty relatable to me. He's successful in college, he gets this prestigious fellowship. He has a bit of failure to launch. He's not quite sure what he wants to do and how he's going to make money doing it. And he takes a job at Starbucks. But, you know, it's not like he took a job, he wasn't in the
- [10:43]
Noam Scheiber
coal mine or something.
- [10:44]
Miles Bryan
Screams like, this is a, you know, low income, oppressive job. Like, this is a job that's like at Starbucks, that's dressed up as an aspirational middle class one. He's not an employee, he's a partner.
- [10:57]
Hims Sponsor Announcer
Right.
- [10:57]
Miles Bryan
You know, the company kind of professes to care a lot about him. And other workers, they have time off, they have kind of decent benefits. And it seemed like those trappings contributed to Teddy sticking around for a long time. And we're going to get to the rest of his story. But I want to ask you about this kind of job because you wrote about people in other kinds of aspirational jobs. Like the Apple Store was another great example. How do you think about these kind of working class jobs disguised as ones that could be more. And how does that fit into the. The story?
- [11:31]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah, so really great story. So I think that is a kind of common thread of the companies I write about, certainly the Apple Store, Starbucks, I flick it, Trader Joe's, rei. All these were stores that, you know, all these were companies that were kind of attractive to college guys who maybe didn't plan A, didn't work out, and so they're kind of figuring out their next move. And these were, you know, typically reasonably comfortable landing spots for groups, groups of people like that. I would say, you know, what is happening in parallel to the story that I'm telling in the story that we discussed about the economy is the jobs at these stores, which had once been very attractive to college grads, start to get kind of degraded over, you know, a decade or two. And what I mean by that is, you know, at Starbucks, for example, in the early 90s, if you worked at Starbucks, you got stock, and a lot of people, you know, just regular baristas, made tens of thousands of dollars. When the company went Public in the 90s, Starbucks was early to offer healthcare benefits to part timers. You know, later offered this educational benefit at Arizona State University. It was as you say it was. The benefits were good. What happens is companies like Starbucks at Apple, Trader Joe's, around the time of the financial crisis, just like when everyone else was trying to figure out how they were going to make ends meet, these companies actually got more austere. Howard Schultz, who had been the CEO, who really did more than anyone else to shape that company, he had not been the CEO, but he comes back because the company is really teetering on collapse. Sales are way down. For the first time in history, they. And so Howard Schultz comes back, he closes hundreds of stores. He kind of just reins in a lot of expenses. And so what you find since 2007, eight, when they really, you know, he came back to save the company, is it just a lot of things get less generous there. The health care over time kind of deteriorates. They go to something called like, scheduling on demand. So it used to be that you had pretty reliable hours you can kind of count on, you know, if you're full time, you can kind of count on getting your 40 hours. They use. They start using the scheduling software which really tries to match, you know, the labor hours they have to the demand for it. And so, you know, as before, you kind of just worked your usual 40 hours a week. Maybe you work from like, you know, eight to four every day. Now, like, you could be scheduled for an 8 to 4 shift, but after like an hour and 20 minutes, the manager sees that demand is not quite as strong as they thought, so they let you go. And suddenly you don't get those extra,
- [13:49]
Miles Bryan
you know, you can't plan a life round.
- [13:50]
Noam Scheiber
So the whole thing gets a lot more precarious after the Great Recession.
- [13:53]
Miles Bryan
And this was also true in kind of a stark way at the Apple Store. Like, you talked about the Apple Store as being this place that, like, attracted, like, genuine, you know, like Apple Store zealots, like people who were just stoked about Apple products. And they had these teams of people which, like, you know, I had this memory of, like, going to the Apple store at the mall when I was a kid. And, you know, I'm 35, so, you know, 18 years ago when you'd go to the see them do like a product demonstration, and it was like a big deal. It Was like exciting.
- [14:26]
Noam Scheiber
It was, there was show and I'm
- [14:27]
Miles Bryan
like, oh, that never, I never do that anymore. And then you write in your book about how the people who had their whole job and their kind of goal was to get into these. Jobs was to teach people and be a creative, like has kind of gone by the wayside.
- [14:41]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah, so you're exactly right. So when Steve Jobs started the Apple store in 2001, the whole idea was to be kind of like missionaries for the Apple religion basically. And so he wanted people who were very knowledgeable. They, they spent a lot of money on training them. They recruited at colleges. They very much wanted college grads that gave them generous benefits. Again, Tim Cook takes over in 2011, you know, just before Steve Jobs passes away. And Cook is very much like not a visionary in the mold of Steve Jobs. He's very much an operations guy, an efficiency guy. Tim Cook is famous for saying that inventory is evil. You know, like this is his like animating principles. We gotta minimize inventory. And so Tim Cook comes in and he sets about trying to make Apple kind of less like this sort of evangelizing missionary type place to just like a retail store. There are a few false starts here and there. He initially installs this guy named John Brow, who had been a British electronics executive. And Broward is even too Tim Cook, like for Tim Cook. And the stores kind of revolt. But over time what you see is the same thing. You see the company spend less on labor. They start shifting to this kind of contingent labor force. So many more camps, temps, seasonal folks. And then there's, as you say, there's this position called a creative, which was a very like sought after, high status position under Jobs. They used to lead these kind of one on one coaching sessions. So if you brought in your Mac or your phone and you wanted to know how to like edit video or edit audio, this creative would kind of talk you through that. And you could, for $99 a year, you could have unlimited one hour sessions with a creative. So this over time evolves and they become not one on one sessions, but kind of group classes. And then the classes evolve so that they're not kind of like teaching, they're more like marketing and bullet. And then after the pandemic, they get rid of the classes altogether. And then they bring it back and there are just way fewer classes. And then ultimately these people just get pulled onto the sales floor and they're just selling Macs and iPhones. And so someone who sort of started life as a creative 10 years earlier and was at Apple the whole time is gradually seeing their job get more and more degraded and they're getting more and more frustrated.
- [16:43]
Miles Bryan
Yes. It's like the. The inshittification of this kind of work.
- [16:46]
Noam Scheiber
Exactly.
- [16:47]
Miles Bryan
I want to get. I want to go back to Teddy and back to the pandemic, because this was sort of a pivot point in your story and that Teddy was working at Starbucks. The job wasn't as good as it was in 1998, but it's still, like, kind of working for him as a holdover. And he's kind of doing it for too long as he tries to figure out what to do next. But then Covid hits, and it kind of. It really sort of accelerates the alienation that he and his colleagues feel. Talked about that and then kind of what it. It led them to do.
- [17:20]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah. So Teddy Biden is. You know, I write in the book about, you know, Teddy had been this, like, celebrity on the campus of Grinnell, and he has all these friends in Chicago. Cause a lot of Grinnell grads go to Chicago. So he's got this big network, and they're all like, why is Teddy still at Starbucks? Like, what is going on with this guy? He was like, the star. Everyone else has kind of moved on with their lives, and he's still there. And Teddy will tell you, by his own admission, like, he has some anxiety issues and depression. And, you know, so it took him a few years to kind of center himself, but by 2019, he's like, okay, I really. You know, his friends. His mom is like, you know, sending him jobs. She sends him. At one point, she sends him a job at the Obama foundation. And. Cause she's like a huge, not so subtle Obama fan. And he's like, why don't you do that job, like, if you love Obama so much. But anyway, by 2019, he's like, okay, I gotta move on. I gotta get my act together. So he starts doing what you do. You send out resumes. And so it looks like it's coming together. He's got a number of interviews, in fact, one was at a youth drama school, basically. And he's like, oh, this is perfect. It looks like that's gonna happen. And then this is like, in February of 2020. 20. And so one after another, he starts getting these kind of sort of polite rejection letters from employers who had been incredibly enthusiastic about him like, a month or two months earlier. And so he sees these doors closing, and he's like, well, I guess I'm at Starbucks for the foreseeable. Future. Initially, Starbucks reacts very generously. They give all their employees or most of their employees weeks off paid. And so he's very grateful for this. Then they bring them back. And again, initially, it feels like, you know, pretty reliable. People are masking. They're really limiting the, you know, the customers who can come into the stores. But by the late summer, early fall, kind of all these things go by the wayside. The masking, they're not enforcing anymore. Suddenly people are, like, crowding into the stores, and people, you know, people at Starbucks are just freaking out, you know, masking culture wars. Exactly. All this becomes highly politicized. And, you know, Teddy and his coworkers are right in the middle of it. And so not only is he, like, stuck when he thought, you know, six months ago he was about to make his escape from Starbucks, but he's being, you know, just. He feels like he's getting on all sides. You know, these customers are, you know, are sort of belligerent. There's no masking. His co workers are getting sick, and it's just a mess.
- [19:28]
Miles Bryan
And this leads Teddy and some other co workers to form a union. Yes.
- [19:36]
Noam Scheiber
So what's going on? So this actually starts in Buffalo in late 21. A group of workers in Buffalo, they think of themselves as just trying to organize a handful of stores in Buffalo. What happens is that this thing just catches fire. So In January of 21, in 22 now, you know, maybe a half a dozen more stores say, we want to vote on a union. By February, there's a few dozen. By the late spring, it's like hundreds of stores. And so Teddy is one of those hundreds of stores that are kind of looking at what happened in Buffalo and are saying, wow, I mean, if they can do it, like, we can do it. And it's very organic. People are just, like, jumping on zoom. They're talking to people who've done it ahead of them in Buffalo and then in Phoenix and in Boston and in Florida, and they just send them a Google Doc with like, okay, here are the six steps. And these people are pretty bright and capable, and they're like, okay. And they're off to the races.
- [20:25]
Miles Bryan
And it's like, you really write about how these young people who have become kind of disaffected with their jobs, who don't have another opportunity, at least at the sort of depths of COVID find purpose in this. They're excited, engaged. It gives Teddy, like, a reason to, you know, get up and go every day. It ends up being this, like, you know, project that's more than just like, I want better pay or I, you know, want safer working conditions.
- [20:50]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Teddy, I think I write about some of his low points at Starbucks before this. And at one point, he texted a friend, and a customer had come in and looked at his name tag on his green apron. And she meant to say, I didn't know you guys had name tags. But what she actually said was, I didn't know you guys had names. And for him, this just, like, epitomizes how, like, dehuman this job is and how alienating is. So in. In that, yeah, he finds real meaning. He's. I talk about this one moment, you know, not long before the vote, where he and another friend of his are just at Starbucks, are sitting there, and the friend says, you know, this is like, the most meaningful thing I've ever done since in my life. And he's like, wow, I think that's probably true for me too, you know, so it is a very much a kind of actualization thing.
- [21:30]
Miles Bryan
You're a labor reporter. You've covered the labor movement in America for a long time. How big of a deal is this? How telling are these union drives?
- [21:39]
Noam Scheiber
So I think there's a couple ways to answer that question. It is unquestionably the case that these were a big deal on their own terms, partly because these were huge companies that had just had zero union presence before. So prior to 21 in the United States, we did not have any unions at Amazon, at Apple, at Trader Joe's, at rei. So these are like, some of these are just huge companies in economic terms. Some have just huge amount of sort of cultural cachet, like a Trader Joe's. Every college educated person, you know, probably has spent some time at Trader Joe's. So I think between the kind of cultural power and the economic power, it is a huge thing that these companies are being unionized for the first time. I talked to a labor studies professor who follows these things, and he says part of the problem with labor in the US is just. It's never talked about. It's just never covered, at least in a way that people with power, with political power, college grads can sort of get their teeth into. And suddenly it's like on the front pages of newspapers, it's at companies that college grads interact with all the time.
- [22:39]
Miles Bryan
It's not history. It's like, actually history.
- [22:41]
Noam Scheiber
And it's not, oh, these people at this meat slaughtering house in Iowa. It's places that you go all the time. Places that you buy products from and that you sort of relate to emotionally. But the other thing is, I think one of the things I try to write about in the book, which I noticed the shift in just in my own time. So I started covering labor in 2015. And when I started it was very much people saw their identity as bound up in their jobs. So if I'm a doctor, that's my identity as a doctor or a tech person or a lawyer or whatever, a journalist. And by the sort of early to mid-2020s, what I start seeing is this kind of growing worker consciousness. So at one point I did a story about doctors unionizing in a healthcare big healthcare system in Minnesota called Alina. So there's a group of doctors, first about 100 hospital doctors unionized in early 23 and then by the way, fall of that year, about 400 primary care doctors across Minnesota and Wisconsin unionized. So this is the largest group of private sector doctors ever to unionized so far as we can tell. And in talking to those doctors, it was just so striking to me how much they thought of themselves as workers too. So, you know, they were just kind of wild. Yeah, you know, they tell me like, you know, you could work for, you know, you could do, be the most highly trained, high status job in the country, be a doctor, or you could be on a factory floor at a GM plant. But you're treated the same way by these employers.
- [24:19]
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- [25:28]
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- [26:17]
Noam Scheiber
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- [26:26]
Noam Scheiber
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- [27:38]
Miles Bryan
Your reporting and your book has inspired a really great debate among smart people online. And one thing I've seen, you know, one sort of take I've seen a few times has been that, you know as the People you write about, doctors, screenwriters, people who are kind of aspirationally middle class in their cultural taste as they've kind of stampeded to the Democratic Party, especially since Trump. You know, they've retrofitted some of their other beliefs too. Like maybe the doctor who would have voted for Mitt Romney and now is a Democrat has kind of of come around to supporting unions. How do you think about that?
- [28:19]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah. So I'd say two things at a high altitude. One is, I think everyone who's been involved in this debate online that you mentioned, I think all of us agree that there's probably some element of ideology and some element of economics that have kind of re. Scrambled these coalitions and people's worldviews. I put more weight on economics, but I think there's clearly an ideological component. You see that in the data. Even people, as you say, who are very affluent are still, you know, kind of moving left.
- [28:46]
Miles Bryan
And it's really in your story, like when you write about Starbucks. Like I was thinking about this character named Shep.
- [28:51]
Noam Scheiber
Yep.
- [28:51]
Miles Bryan
Who I believe is non binary.
- [28:53]
Noam Scheiber
Yep.
- [28:53]
Miles Bryan
And, you know, came to a union rally wearing a T shirt that said, be gay and organized. And I was like, oh, be gay and organized. This is like a great sort of encapsulation of this question.
- [29:01]
Noam Scheiber
Totally. Yeah. So no question that ideology is a big piece of this. I think to me, the thing, you know, there's a lot of smaller data points, but I think the macro data point that tells me that economic is a big. And probably the biggest thing in driving this is you start to see the shift or you see the big lurch left on Economics in 2008. Right. So what's happening in 2008? Well, the bottom's falling out of the economy. So you see a little. I'm alluding to a paper by a political scientist named Will Marble, who's now at Stanford and the Hoover Institution, and he's got this great paper that really looks at a lot of the very detailed survey data on kind of people's stances on a whole variety of cultural issues, economic issues. And what you see is people start moving a little left in 2004. And I think that's what we're talking about. It's a very polarized election. Bush is running against gay marriage, and the Democrats are on the other side of this. And it's a very polarizing election. But the shift is only it's pretty small in 2004. Where you see the big lurch is in 2008. And that's when the tectonic plates of the global economy start to shift too. And then the other I think key thing is on a whole variety of dimensions, employment rates for young college grads, median wages for young college grads, unemployment rates. It doesn't really recover after 2008. 9. So we see older college grads, we see their employment rates go up, but younger grads, it's still bumping along at, at a kind of historically low rate as late as like 2018, 2019. And so you have this like this big earthquake in 2008 and then for a whole decade after that things don't really get back to normal. And then of course, we have the pandemic.
- [30:45]
Miles Bryan
In your book, you describe these sort of like green shoot moments of collaboration and cooperation between this new white collar working class and like the old traditional working class people who didn't go to college, people who just work with their hands. You talk about this at Amazon, where college educated people ended up contributing to the unionization effort on Staten island, right?
- [31:07]
Noam Scheiber
Yep.
- [31:08]
Miles Bryan
And you talk about this as this sort of union between traditional auto workers and graduate students who join the UAW who end up supporting the president there, who led to the nationwide strike a couple years ago that got some big benefits for those unions. How confident, how optimistic are you that these two groups of people will keep working together? We'll be able to get over any cultural differences and sort of achieve their, their economic goals?
- [31:36]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah. So I think it's important not to be naive about this. Obviously there are, there are kind of cultural divides between college grads and non grads. We've seen this in the growing split in the way people vote for president. So when Obama ran for reelection in 2012, college grads and non grads voted pretty much the same way. You know, it was a kind of couple points in either direction. By 2024, college grads voted for Kamala Harris by about a 15 point margin and non grad supported Trump by like a 13, 14 point margin. So like a huge divide opened up. And you hear the term diploma divide and it's really opened up, you know, since the kind of beginning of the Trump era in 2016. And we've seen it expand. So I don't want to be naive about this. Clearly, on issues like trans rights, even immigration, crime, you see this divide. I would say a couple things. One is we've seen that when a politician can kind of center economics and economic issues in their campaign, that you are able to kind of bridge that divide. And I think Zoran Mamdani here in New York City is a prime example. Was really able to kind of make the campaign about very concrete economic issues. Affordability, fast free buses, public grocery stores, rent. Things that, you know, are both preoccupations for people who went to college but are kind of struggling to pay the bills and people who didn't go to college. And I think you saw that, I mean, you know, in the 80s and 90s, college grads were very much not like socialists. Right. They were, they were pretty kind of right of center on economics. When Mamdani ran last year, he got overwhelming support from college guys.
- [33:05]
Miles Bryan
So I think Mamdani is like the best case scenario for this.
- [33:09]
Noam Scheiber
So no bias. Yeah. And I think that, you know, the other thing I would say is some of the reviews of my book have pointed out it flagged certain issues like, oh, you can't imagine college grads and non grads seeing Aida. And this or this issue would definitely divide them. Some of those are overstated too. I mean, one that came up in a review of my book is Gaza. This idea that, yes, maybe they're aligned on economics, but an issue as controversial and divisive as Gaza would clearly divide them. Actually, if you look at polling college grads under 35 and people who didn't go to college under 35, they basically feel the same way about Israel and Palestine. In fact, the non grads maybe are slightly more sympathetic to Palestinians even than grads. So Gaza is not really an issue that divides young people under 35 on the basis of education. And then even I write about this toward the end of my book. Even if you look at crime and immigration, two things that you really associate with Trump and polarization, college guys actually moved much more toward the non grad position during the Biden era.
- [34:09]
Miles Bryan
On crime.
- [34:09]
Noam Scheiber
On crime and on crime and immigration. So it used to be much more like, like much more sort of pro immigration and became much more skeptical under Biden. You could argue that that's just kind of how bad the issue got, but a lot of convergence. And then on crime, Gallup and Pew asked questions like, how concerned are you about crime? And that became a much bigger concern for college grads, also in the 2000s. So that's really interesting.
- [34:34]
Miles Bryan
I didn't know that.
- [34:35]
Noam Scheiber
Again, I would not argue that there's no sort of work to be done and that there's no kind of cultural issues that divide college grads and non grads. Clearly, when it comes to kind of sexual, you know, sexual identity issues, trans rights, a big divide that's Just obvious. It's in the data. There's no way around it. But I think, one, the size of the divide, at least on certain issues is overstated. And two, you do see that when, you know, a politician is able to kind of shift the, the center of gravity of a campaign to kind of economic issues that, that you're actually able to unite these two groups pretty well.
- [35:19]
Miles Bryan
Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics, but what do they actually mean?
- [35:27]
Progressive Speaker
For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo.
- [35:54]
Miles Bryan
And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people?
- [35:59]
Noam Scheiber
So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that.
- [36:04]
News Reporter
That's like secondary.
- [36:05]
Noam Scheiber
Third, like, that doesn't. That's not a priority.
- [36:08]
Miles Bryan
That's this Week on America actually. Let's dig in.
- [36:16]
News Reporter
Complex and unprecedented. The Spanish authorities are calling it antes del desembarco asymptomaticas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta, or maybe hantavirus stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now? Since. Since maybe Covid. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm.
- [36:41]
Noam Scheiber
We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early this morning. And we assessed that individual.
- [36:50]
News Reporter
They are doing well, possibly because this is not the one to freak out over today. Explained drops every weekday afternoon.
- [37:01]
Miles Bryan
Foreign.
- [37:13]
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- [38:00]
Miles Bryan
Okay, I want to ask you just a couple more questions. I want to look towards the future and talk about the elephant in the room I haven't brought up yet, which is AI. You know, you tell this story that starts in the bush years and you know, there's this hinge point of the Great Recession where things start to get a lot worse for college grads. But we're in this moment now where, you know, there is a collective freakout about, you know, whether college graduates, it's coming of age now. Ish. The next couple of years are going to be able to find any kind of initial white collar jobs or whether they're all going to be replaced with AI agents and whether people who've made it a bit up the ladder are going to get knocked off it because they can also be replaced by AI agents. Do you think we're heading towards a world where the people who had made it up a bit and been like, oh, I'm safe, like I'm on the, I'm on the ladder, like they're going to end up in this kind of working class proletariat group too?
- [38:56]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah. So AI is obviously a huge source of anxiety. And one thing that's interesting is we've actually seen the labor market for recent college grads get substantially worse in the last five years or so. So the New York Fed has this data about the unemployment rate for recent college grads. And between 1990 and like 2018, the unemployment rate for recent grads is almost never above the overall unemployment rate in the country. It's almost always lower. For the past five years, it, you know, in 21, it kind of shot above the overall rate and it's just gotten much more above the overall rate. So we've had this labor market that's gotten worse and worse for recent college grads. Just, you know, just in the past five years. Almost none of that is related to AI. So almost all of that is like pre AI. And I, you know, I think it's a lot of what I write about in the book. It's, you know, kind of slow, gradual decline in demand for jobs for people with college degrees. There is this element of AI kind of pre gen AI, AI that's been like gradually chipping away at jobs. I, you know, I've written before about a group of people who are buyers for big retail brands like Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom and Macy's. And these are people whose jobs is to like figure out what people are gonna want to wear in a year and go to talk to designers and go to fashion shows. And about seven, eight years ago a lot of companies started realizing that the machines could do this very well. And so this was a very high status job, paid very well into the six figures. But the AI, you know, again pre Genai, the AI was able to do this as well or better than a human. So we've had this kind of slow erosion due to automation and more recently due to AI. I do think that's getting more pronounced. We're clearly seeing. I just did a piece this week, week, last week about the way AI is being adopted in the white collar world. And I talked to a bunch of folks at consulting firms and software companies and I talked to data scientists and even kind of industrial concerns and all of them in some form or another told me like, yeah, we're just hiring fewer entry level folks. So the one thing that I think is important to keep in mind is, is young people right out of college are actually pretty cheap and they're pretty fungible. Right. So the big flaw is that they don't know a lot, but their big advantage is they don't know a lot either. And so I do think employers are going to figure out a way to make use of young people out of college. I think ultimately the thing that scares me most about AI is the kind of mid career people who are actually much more expensive. They have a lot of knowledge, they've been doing a job for 10, 15 years, they may not be quite as nimble in adopting new technology. And I think the ultimate.
- [41:38]
Miles Bryan
If you're listening, please turn this off now.
- [41:40]
Noam Scheiber
Exactly. So I think the ultimate end game may be, you know, we're going to clearly like this is going to impact people right out of college and we're going to see like some gradual erosion in demand for those. But my big concern is that ultimately it's the kind of mid career and even older folks that are going to get hit hardest by this once the AI gets sophisticated enough to replace that.
- [41:57]
Miles Bryan
What do you think this does to unions and the union story? Like on the one hand, if you know, workers in kind of laptop job positions have been focused on unionizing their shops and then those jobs just disappear, that seems bad. On the other, like could it mean that the union fights at places like retail stores, at places like at Starbucks are more important because like those are the jobs that are harder to AI away?
- [42:26]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah, a couple things I mean, one is, AI has played a role in some of these campaigns. Is probably the most important campaign was the writers strike in 2023. This was something that became a very, very contentious issue, I think. You know, I describe in the book how the writers had, you know, a whole variety of other demands having to do with, like, staffing of writers rooms in the streaming era. They wanted, like, a minimum number of people to be able to write a show. And then very late in the negotiation, they said, you know, well, they didn't say they had introduced these asks on AI, but late in negotiation, the industry group that they were negotiating with said, actually, we don't want to do any of this stuff on AI. We just want to preserve the flexibility of our members to do whatever we want. And it freaked out the writers. And so the strike, which had been kind of focused on staffing and pay, obviously became a strike that was as much about AI as anything else. And you saw this right away. Suddenly on the picket lines. There are all these signs about AI and how the companies are trying to replace it. So this was a very big deal in the writer strike in 2023. They ended up getting a lot of wins and protections on AI that they can't be forced to use AI, that AI can't get a writer credit, only a human can be an actual writer, which is really important for compensation. So this played out already. But you're absolutely right. I mean, there is a sense that people who stare at a computer all day long, if all your work is mediated through a computer, it can probably be done by a computer at some point. Whereas some, you know, jobs that require human interactions, a lot of social skills, those jobs are probably safer. So I do think, you know, there is some sense that, like, maybe if you've been kind of having a tough time getting a job in a white collar setting, you know, as a management consultant or as a software engineer, that is very painful and frustrating. But maybe it just allowed you to make this transition earlier to a field that's not as susceptible to being cannibalized by AI. You know, again, I think that is probably a little simplistic, but I do think that there is this sense that there are going to be a set of jobs that are not as easy to automate, and those jobs probably involve interacting more with other humans than a lot of the jobs that college grads have traditionally done.
- [44:39]
Miles Bryan
Podcasters are safe.
- [44:41]
Noam Scheiber
Well, yeah, we'll see. I mean, there's some pretty shockingly good technology that can actually just create a podcast from A set of academic articles. So I don't want to go that far, but they're probably safer than your typical software engine.
- [44:55]
Miles Bryan
Let me ask you a last question. Reading your book and thinking about your reporting on thinking about what makes the working class had me thinking about Marx and early communist literature. And you know, they were fairly confident that crappy jobs on the factory floor would radicalize and ultimately mobilize the working class to revolt. But that's not, you know, entirely what ended up happening. Instead, said people working in market economies have seen their living standards improve a lot since the 19th century in a way that surprised some of those early theorists that capitalism sort of adjusted and raised people's standards of living. Do you think this time could be different? Maybe different.
- [45:38]
Noam Scheiber
We did get this huge surge in radicalization and unionization in the 1930s, right. And we had other ways of unionization. But in the 30s, 40s we had, you know, it was like the most rapid expansion of union membership in history. It has never been exceeded since then. And up through World War II, the late 40s, we went from like single digit unionization, you know, pre 1930s to by, you know, the five years after World War II or the early 50s, it was up to about a third of the workforce. So we did have like, Martin Marx would have probably pointed to that and said, hey, you know, you have all these people in like really crappy working conditions making not great wages who are frustrated and alienated. And you know, we got this surge of like millions and millions of them forming unionized unions and often, you know, very violently like taking on their employers.
- [46:29]
Miles Bryan
So they didn't overthrow capitalism.
- [46:31]
Noam Scheiber
They didn't overthrow capitalism, but they did change the, change the kind of terms of the arrangement. But you're right, I mean, then, you know, kind of Post World War II, I think what you had is, is a whole reimagining of the compact between workers and labor. And you have different moments. One is called the Treaty of Detroit, where the big automakers decide, okay, yeah, we don't want to fight these guys anymore. We're going to give them health care and all these benefits and we're going to kind of raise wages over time. And so you really did kind of work out this kind of grand bargain. I guess that did kind of siphon off a lot of that energy and frustration. And I'd say that that bargain held for many decades. It also led to a kind of growing kind of professional managerial class. And these people are the people, the kind of the antecedents, the Predecessors of the people we're talking about. Right. And people doing middle management jobs and all kinds of consulting jobs and lawyers. All these folks were people who had a great living and a great livelihood in the market economy. But yes, as you sort of cannibalize these jobs, jobs and you get back to a moment where, or a kind of more confrontational relationship between management and labor where it looks like management is trying to just do produce the most they can for the cheapest they can. I do think that's likely to kind of spur a backlash. And AI feels like it's like right on the front lines of that struggle. You know, that said, labor law makes it really tough to form a union in this country. If you look at polls, about 70% of the country approves of unions, but only about 10% of the country is in unions. So I'm skeptical that we're gonna see like mass organization, mass unionization. But I do think we're gonna see this start to flare up in just a whole variety of other ways. You know, part of it will be in the political arena. You know, we talked about Mamdani. I think we'll see other candidates who kind of play to this. There was this institution of the kind of the quarterly town hall meeting or the all hands meeting and used to be very collegial and people could ask whatever they wanted and, and the kind of CEOs would wax, would sort of elaborate and talk about all their plans for all these great ideas. And now they're much more locked down. They screen the questions. People get hauled out of there if they start freaking out. So I do think you've already seen kind of an increase in the tensions.
- [48:54]
Miles Bryan
So your bet as a labor reporter, an expert, is that we're heading maybe towards, towards the kind of labor unrest that we had in the 1930s. But it's unclear if we're going to get another kind of grand bargain like we did in the post war period or something else.
- [49:11]
Noam Scheiber
Yeah, that's right. I think we're, we're heading to similar levels of unrest. Certainly if the predictions about job loss and AI come true or even, you know, kind of come a fraction of them come true, we'll see something that looks like a lot like the 1930s, at least in terms of the ferocity and the kind of radicalization. You know, even if it's, it's a kind of steady erosion. You know, my, my expectation would be, you know, we'll just have, you know, every year, you know, a kind of half a percent, 1% fewer employed. And after 10 years, that's, that's like millions of people. And the thing that we know about college grads is they feel a lot of agency, right? They, they feel like they can participate in the political system. They feel like they, they have ways to make their voices heard. They get online, they find one another, they go to rallies, they go to protests, they vote. So I think this is a group that when it feels vulnerable and when it feels like its livelihood is in danger, the political system is going to know about it. So I do feel like we're headed toward a period of some real unrest.
- [50:16]
Miles Bryan
Noam Scheiber, thank you so much for coming on the Gray Area.
- [50:18]
Noam Scheiber
Really, really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.
- [50:27]
Miles Bryan
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know I did. But as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line atthegray areaox.com or leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. And once you're finished with that, go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. Podcast this episode was produced by Thor new writer and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Sarah Schwepp and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes at you Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the show. The Gray Area is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know. Thanks.
- [51:36]
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