Scheiber, who covers labor for The New York Times, is like a zoologist whose fieldwork has revealed the existence of an animal that contradicts some long-standing theory of speciation ... The individual stories Scheiber tells sometimes feel like cases of bad luck or poor decision making, but he’s writing more broadly about a generation of graduates whose prospects have unquestionably dimmed ... Though Scheiber occasionally questions the wisdom of his protagonists, he’s plainly on their side.
These stories are well told—Mr. Scheiber is a fine writer—and the precarity of these young workers’ lives is vividly evoked ... Mr. Scheiber’s book is useful as a guide to unionization activities among recent college graduates. But it does not make a convincing case that the college-educated working class is a harbinger of broader social change.
As a reporter, Scheiber is brilliant; as an author, somewhat less so. The first half of the book occasionally feels like a notebook dump, and his effort to weave together multiple storylines from workers at Apple, Starbucks and Disney can make it feel like an overlong newspaper story ... The book really gets going when Scheiber starts to connect the dots between the old and new union movements ... Scheiber’s book makes clear that the K-shaped economy — up for some, down for others — is coming for more and more of us.
