The College-Educated Working Class
Can a generation of graduates frustrated by their economic prospects change American labor politics?
This is an age of mutinies. For more than a decade in America, they’ve come so thick and fast that they trip over one another: the Tea Party, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Resistance, the anti-lockdown protests, the insurrection, the anti-ICE protests. The ur-mu...
The narrative presents a compelling case for the rise of a college-educated working class as a potential force for labor activism and economic justice. The strongest version of this argument highlights the genuine grievances of young, educated workers trapped in precarious jobs, their disillusionment with corporate exploitation, and their turn toward unionization as a means of reclaiming agency. The piece effectively contextualizes this shift within broader economic trends—stagnant wages, elite ...