When Did White-Collar Work Start to Look So Bleak?
This spring, across the nation’s auditoriums and quadrangles, members of the class of 2026 took their seats to receive remarks from distinguished guests. The graduation speech is a thankless form: generalized, impersonal exhortation/congratulation is almost guaranteed to be forgettable, if all goes well. But this year, on at least a few American campuses, all did not go well.
At the University of Arizona, Eric Schmidt, the former C.E.O. of Google, told the crowd that artificial intelligence “will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have,” a sweeping promise that landed like a threat. The graduates booed—just as they did at the University of Central Florida, where the real-estate executive Gloria Caulfield called A.I. “the next Industrial Revolution,” and at Middle Tennessee State University, where the record executive Scott Borchetta responded by telling them to “deal with it.”
It wasn’t so long ago that you could address a commencement-weekend crowd and largely sidestep A.I.—even last year, the subject had not yet assumed quite the same aura of inevitability that it projects today. Jodi Kantor’s new book, “How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work” (Little, Brown), arrives as an artifact from this slightly different era. A slim volume published in time for graduation gift-giving, “How to Start” began as a 2025 Class Day keynote speech at Columbia University. Kantor, a reporter at the Times, touches briefly on A.I. in the book, but she is less interested in the forces changing work than in changing the way students feel about it. She herself graduated from Columbia in 1996 and (as she explains in the speech and the book) attended Harvard Law School before dropping out to pursue her dream of being a journalist. “Imagining that anyone would want to read stories that I wrote or edited—who did I think I was?” she recalls thinking. “I was a kid from Staten Island and New Jersey.” She’d go on to edit the Times’ Arts & Leisure section before the age of thirty, and to win a Pulitzer for her investigation of Harvey Weinstein. “How to Start,” intended as a guide for young people just beginning their careers, offers advice drawn from her years both working and reporting on working conditions. “I have documented some of the worst of the workplace, and still I am telling you: Do not give up on it,” she implores.
Kantor is an unabashed company woman (“Thank you to all the bosses,” she writes, in a section of the acknowledgments devoted to her employer), but, more than that, she is a partisan of Work writ large. “Cancer therapies, new commercial aircraft, winning political campaigns, and every television show you’ve ever enjoyed were all made by groups of former strangers who labored together in shared discovery, discipline, and purpose,” she writes, as if scripting a public-service announcement for the concept of jobs. But, as much as anything, her cheerleading underscores the ambient dread and despair that she feels obliged to counteract, the same sort of desperation that came into view with this year’s graduation boos. How, exactly, did the prospect of white-collar employment—the future presumed to unfurl before a newly minted college graduate—start to look so bleak?
Kantor’s career outlook, her office romance of ambition and fulfillment, harks back to the nineteen-eighties. It’s the type of fantasy seen onscreen in Mike Nichols’s 1988 movie, “Working Girl,” which tells the story of Tess McGill (played by Melanie Griffith), a Wall Street secretary from Staten Island with aspirations as towering and improbable as her hair. She longs to stop covering the phones and to start making deals.
Tess has good ideas—serving dim sum at a cocktail party, for example—but she doesn’t have the expensive pedigree or wardrobe of Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), her boss in mergers and acquisitions. Katharine professes a wish to see hard work rewarded; in practice, though, she steals one of Tess’s ideas (for averting a hostile takeover) and passes it off as her own. Through a series of cinematic contrivances, Tess borrows Katharine’s skirt suit, claims due credit for her business sense, and wins the affections of Katharine’s financier boyfriend (Harrison Ford). It’s clear, though, that the real reward is an office of her own. The movie ends with the camera pulling back from her window to show the countless others alongside it, a skyscraper’s worth of office dwellers filling the screen.
In an earlier era, this panorama might have communicated the puny anonymity of corporate life. A viewer would have understood that the workers within were gray-flannel-clad drones—each one a “small creature who is acted upon but who does not act, who works along unnoticed . . . never talking loud, never talking back, never taking a stand,” as C. Wright Mills puts it in the 1951 book “White Collar.” Needless to say, such a scene would not have been set (as it is in “Working Girl”) to the swells of Carly Simon singing about dreamers in silver cities. But what Tess wants isn’t to be any ordinary white-collar worker. What Tess wants is to be a yuppie, one of the young strivers establishing themselves as media main characters while reshaping the American economy.
Of course, the word “yuppie” never appears in the film. In an appraisal of the type for Esquire magazine published the year Nichols’s film came out, Hendrik Hertzberg notes that “yuppie” was “understood almost universally as a term of abuse.” The young urban professionals—with their Gucci briefcases and their fitness crazes—were pop-sociological punching bags, recognizable enough that anyone could roll their eyes and vague enough that everyone could assume “yuppie” meant someone else. In “Working Girl,” Katharine is the yuppie as seen from the outside, all cutthroat ambition, finicky taste, and moral vacuity. Tess, meanwhile, suggests a more vulnerable reality behind that brittle exterior—a faith that talent and perseverance can pay off, a desire for agency amid dispiriting circumstances.
The historian Dylan Gottlieb, in his new book, “Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York” (Harvard University Press), considers his subject with an eye to this interior view. Gottlieb is no yuppie apologist, but he offers a portrait of yuppie motivations with more nuance than simple consumerism. He does so by focussing on the thing that defined yuppies more deeply than their fondness for Chardonnay or sushi: their work.
“Yuppies” examines the men and women employed in the intertwined fields of finance and Big Law in nineteen-eighties New York—a world then in the midst of transformation. Before the yuppie era, a certain staid gentility prevailed. Banks maintained long-standing relationships with corporate clients; white-shoe law firms didn’t compete for business; hostile takeovers and the like were regarded as somewhat unsavory. All that was about to change. Gottlieb writes that his book’s “precipitating event” is “the unshackling of Wall Street during the Carter and Reagan administrations.” Finance became the center of the American economy, and its gravitational pull drew legions of high-achieving young people to New York.
A proliferation of complicated new financial instruments required more employees to sell (and to explain) them to customers, and more lawyers to hash out the deals. Banks expanded their recruiting efforts on college campuses, with dramatic success. “In 1979, only one in thirty seniors at the University of Pennsylvania headed to Wall Street,” Gottlieb reports. “By 1987, it was one in three.” These recruits differed from their predecessors: they weren’t all men, and they didn’t all come from the field’s traditional hiring pool of Wasp and German Jewish élites. Higher education had diversified in the preceding years, and, when banks ramped up recruiting, they were drawing on a new population’s talent. Even if a Cinderella story like Tess McGill’s was a fairy tale—and even if the upper ranks of power remained stubbornly white and male—the presence of driven outsiders burnished the industry’s preferred image of itself as a meritocracy.
Career, for Gottlieb’s yuppies, was a life style: the ethos of hard work and competition which defined their lives on the job pervaded their leisure hours as well. Long-distance running was the most blatant case in point—a punishing feat of endurance that held out the promise of quantified individual success. Marathon-training regimens were the subject of office bonding; lunch-hour jogs supplanted a previous generation’s golf and Martinis as occasions for networking. But even pursuits that might appear more obviously indulgent—dining, say—attained gruelling rigor in yuppie hands. Eschewing rote fine dining, Gottlieb writes, the yuppie “accrued more status by consuming omnivorously” (and thus dim sum earns Tess credibility with Katharine). The Zagat restaurant guide began as the hobby of a husband-and-wife pair who’d met at Yale Law, and soon became a popular business gift—one that, in Gottlieb’s telling, affirmed giver and receiver alike as “knowing members of the meritocratic elite.”
The flip side of believing that you’ve won your place through hard work is believing that you need to keep working hard to maintain it, a need that was particularly acute among the newest arrivals in the yuppies’ professional milieu. “High starting salaries were an obvious draw for those with large student loans,” Gottlieb notes. Careers in finance had begun to follow a set course—an undergraduate degree, two years as an analyst, an M.B.A., then a mid-level position at a bank—which also meant that recruiters could promise “a well-defined path for students who couldn’t rely on familial or class ties to the upper strata of the business world.” Meanwhile, at the law firms that handled Wall Street clients, work grew simultaneously more abundant and less likely to lead to professional advancement. Being an associate had once involved direct mentorship from a firm’s partners, and a reasonable chance of becoming a partner oneself, but, with the business deluge of the eighties, firms began hiring young associates in bulk. These associates regularly put in seventy-five-hour weeks on work that had been broken down into tasks requiring little skill and offering little legal education. Because of the associates’ sheer numbers, few would ever make partner. “It was no accident that these firms were diversifying in terms of gender and race at the very same time they were making life increasingly miserable for their associates,” Gottlieb writes.
At least some of the yuppies claimed the pace as a point of pride, even a thrill. Gottlieb quotes a onetime associate at the then ascendant law firm Skadden Arps—which rose to prominence with its handling of mergers and acquisitions—who remembers feeling “electricity pulsing down the hallways.” But the adrenaline accompanied an undercurrent of anxiety. “If anything,” Michael Kinsley wrote in The New Republic, in 1984, “yuppy culture is permeated with a sense of downward mobility, of couples struggling with two incomes to achieve a middle-class life that their parents enjoyed with one.” Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 1989 book, “Fear of Falling,” notes that “the female yuppie, whose odd uniform of skirted suit and sneakers symbolized the compromise between capitalism and feminism,” had become a particularly potent caricature. Perhaps this was because women’s hard-won presence in the professional sphere was a reminder that, for the yuppies, there was no world outside work. (“Let’s merge,” Katharine purrs, during an amorous moment in “Working Girl.”)
Notwithstanding the gleefully greedy yuppies who frolicked in the popular imagination, Ehrenreich describes grim resignation among the college students she encountered in the nineteen-eighties. They’d “started out wanting to be environmental chemists, special-education teachers, public administrators, or novelists,” she writes, and they “redirected their aspirations to business or law” only later. “They did so, in most cases, out of a sullen sense of necessity, trading off personal autonomy, idealism, and creativity for what they hoped would be safety and possibly comfort.” Of course, such individual reluctance does little to blunt the effects of their choices. As junior bankers and Big Law associates, they may have been overworked and locked in competition, but they were also “amassing small fortunes chopping up, spinning off, merging, offshoring, or otherwise squeezing short-term value out of companies that had once offered meaningful security to their employees and other stakeholders,” Gottlieb writes. They had become “the authors of a more unequal chapter in American life.”
For the children of yuppies, “there appeared to be only two outcomes,” Gottlieb writes, in his epilogue. “Dogged pursuit of the yuppie ideal or a steep drop into the precariat.” Or, perhaps, both. By the nineties, when such children were in elementary school, “college for all” had become “a national obsession—the way every American could achieve middle-class affluence,” Noam Scheiber writes in his new book, “Mutiny” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Subtitled “The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class,” it follows a cohort of young workers for whom the dogged pursuit of meritocratic success has failed to ward off precarity. Among college graduates in the years immediately following the Great Recession, according to a 2024 analysis, more than half took a job that did not require a degree, and, ten years later, forty-five per cent were still similarly employed. Those graduates at least had jobs; many didn’t. “The new, dramatically negative trend shows no sign of letting up,” Jesse Rothstein, the former chief economist of the U.S. Labor Department, wrote, in a 2020 paper that Scheiber quotes.
Scheiber’s subjects are ambitious, educated, and professionally stymied. They have degrees (and very often tremendous student debt), but the kind of employment that was supposed to be the terminus of their path has failed to materialize. In their frustration, they turn to workplace organizing. Teddy Hoffman was a Starbucks barista and a union leader in his early thirties when Scheiber, a reporter for the Times, met him on a Chicago picket line in late 2022. “As we talked, I realized there was something familiar about Teddy’s affect,” Scheiber writes in “Mutiny.” “He had a precise way of speaking, as though sifting thoughts into words, and his manner was both self-effacing and self-assured. He used lots of adverbs.” Hoffman mentions spending time travelling after graduation, and Scheiber asks whether he was backpacking. “I had gotten, uh, a Watson Fellowship,” Hoffman tells him. This is, Scheiber explains, “a post-graduate scholarship that ranks in prestige near the Rhodes and the Marshall, and is more exclusive than its better-known cousin, the Fulbright.”
A mere Fulbright scholar working at a Starbucks you could understand, or so Scheiber’s tone seems to imply. Hoffman’s mother, when Scheiber later speaks to her, is well acquainted with this flavor of incredulity. “The crap we got from other parents—‘Why are you allowing your son to work at Starbucks?’ ” she remembers. Hoffman started there as a stopgap while holding out hope for other pursuits; he didn’t arrive at his workplace with plans to unionize. (Scheiber speaks to other Starbucks workers elsewhere who did come in with that intention, a practice known as salting.)
But the old equations that linked effort, employment, money, and prestige no longer seem to apply. For Hoffman and his expensively educated peers in the service industry, a white-collar job looks like a fantasy, one that companies play to with a patronizing transparency. Starbucks calls its baristas “partners,” as if title alone could compensate for a lack of authority. Apple Stores, another workplace where Scheiber follows union efforts, employ “geniuses” (who provide tech support) and “creatives” (who teach customer classes); Apple’s retail employees can apply for a program called Career Experience—something like an internship within the company, offering a long-shot chance at a corporate position. Chaya Barrett, a “creative” in Maryland, recalls attending a recruiting event “where candidates were told that getting a job at the Apple Store was more competitive than getting into Harvard, at least on a raw percentage basis.”
This is a workplace speaking the language of meritocracy to employees for whom it is a mother tongue. Without much of a professional outlet, such workers channel the habits that they’ve spent a lifetime honing into other less corporate-friendly pursuits. Scheiber makes it plain (to the detriment, perhaps, of his book’s narrative momentum) that organizing is hard and often anticlimactic work—no task for slackers. When Hoffman’s hours are cut, he takes a second job in order to stay at Starbucks and see the union campaign through.
In 2016, a team led by the economist Raj Chetty published research showing that young people entering the workforce could no longer expect to outearn their parents. For those born in the nineteen-eighties, the odds were roughly fifty per cent, compared with ninety per cent for those born in 1940. But most of that decline had taken place in the years between the mid-forties and the early sixties. Millennials, famously, had it bad, but baby boomers didn’t have it so great themselves. The anxious striving they embodied and inculcated in their children wasn’t misguided in either case.
The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild spent several years in the early nineties interviewing employees at a corporation she pseudonymously called Amerco. As she documented their efforts to balance work and family life, television provided a context and a backdrop. There were cartoons while dressing children, evening news while cooking dinner, and, before bed, families watched mutely as onscreen families laughed and talked. “Ironically,” Hochschild writes, “this entertainment may even show viewers a ‘family life’ that, as in the sitcoms Murphy Brown and Ink, has moved to work.”
Workplace TV is a stalwart genre. But workplace TV is itself the product of a workplace, and, lately, it’s not hard to see evidence of an industry’s dim view of office life in a show like “Severance,” which depicts employment as a matter of surrendering control of one’s mind to the demands of a mysterious corporation. Television writing is one of the white-collar jobs for which the expectation of professional stability has deteriorated in recent years. “Mutiny” connects the struggles of college-educated service workers to new organizing efforts among doctors, architects, and engineers; it also tracks the 2023 strike by the Writers Guild of America.
For years, TV writing was the rare creative field in which work looked a lot like a reliable, even upper-middle-class nine-to-five. Writers found steady employment, steady pay, and health insurance; the industry’s business model supported robust staffing for long-running shows and paid residuals as they went into reruns. The rise of streaming services and the growing power of tech companies in Hollywood threatened this prosperity. Like Scheiber’s subjects at the Apple Store and Starbucks, young writers “had left college with certain career ambitions, only to find themselves laboring in a different kind of job for longer than expected.” As they tried to gain their professional footing, they were “bouncing back and forth between writing jobs and tours as low-paid assistants or jobs in retail and hospitality.” Even established writers were scrambling for fewer and worse positions, and the prospect of A.I.-generated scripts didn’t seem far off.
The studios, Scheiber writes, made some flawed assumptions on the eve of the strike. For one, they underestimated the danger that the writers saw from A.I. They also overestimated how secure the older writers felt (or how many writers felt secure at all)—they assumed they’d be able to play the disgruntled youth off an Old Guard faction that would just want to get back to work. Instead, they met a surprising degree of intergenerational solidarity. After more than five months of picket lines, the Writers Guild won a contract that satisfied its membership.
The way people feel about work is a phenomenon larger than any one job, and it involves a sprawling world of relationships. In Hochschild’s research, which she wrote up in her 1997 book, “The Time Bind,” she notices something unexpected. People told her that they wanted more time with their families, and Amerco offered policies that were, on paper, generous. Yet few took advantage of them, and, in fact, many Amerco workers seemed to gravitate toward shouldering ever more work. Sometimes this was the result of unspoken norms that official company policies had failed to counteract: an H.R. department talking up flextime didn’t suddenly dissipate the arms-race pressure ambitious employees felt to prove their dedication through long hours. Sometimes it was a response to their families’ material needs. In either case, work had come to look like a problem and a solution simultaneously. Work was a place to see friends, to accomplish tasks, to receive recognition; it was a place that promised a sense of control, which was particularly seductive because control was so frequently lacking at home. “People wonder: Where do we feel the safest?” Hochschild writes. “Even among those with lousy jobs, the answer is sometimes ‘at work.’ ”
This sense of control is the crux of Jodi Kantor’s ode to jobs. “For many of us, work is the route to satisfaction over which we often have the most agency,” she writes. “In a healthy work setting the rules of the game have clarity: if we are hard-working, strategic, skilled, and collegial, we maximize our results.” But “many of us” and “often” are hedges that are (as they say) doing a lot of work. The workplace’s sense of control can prove illusory—as it did in the era of yuppie-wrought corporate consolidation, and as it does now for graduates entering an economy destabilized by new uncertainties.
Kantor expresses an empathy for young people that the more callous of this year’s graduation speakers seemed to lack. (Pull up YouTube, and you can watch Eric Schmidt smile while dismissing the fear “your generation” has of the future.) A call for cross-generational collaboration is where Hochschild arrives at the end of “The Time Bind.” Perhaps, she muses, factory workers and frazzled yuppie parents could “find common cause in their children”—children, that is, of the eighties and nineties. “In fact, the most ardent constituency for a solution to the time bind are those too young as yet to speak up.” They were then, but they aren’t anymore. ♦