![](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/04/10/nyregion/10BIG-1/10BIG-1-facebookJumbo.jpg)
Those who began their careers in high-end magazines anytime through the financial crisis of 2008 largely accepted a system in which bloodline was often the pathway to success and after-hours gig work was par for the course if you didn’t have a private fortune to buoy you in a system that delivered little above retail wage. For a long time, there was broad consensus that status was a rightful form of compensation, that working in the industry that brought us Richard Avedon and “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” made up for whatever discomforts arose from being forced to live with five disagreeable musicians on Avenue C.
Those in their 20s and 30s now filling junior and middle-management positions at places like Condé Nast effectively have the worst of both worlds — inadequate pay and the vanished prestige that has come at the hands of digitization.
Just a few days after the announcement about Condé Nast came the news that more than 2,600 workers at an enormous Amazon facility in Staten Island voted to form a union in what has been regarded as the biggest victory for organized labor in decades. Over the past 40 years, the share of workers represented by a union has fallen by half. But white-collar workers have increasingly galvanized. Last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even as the number of workers belonging to a union declined by 241,000, the highest unionization rates were essentially among professional workers — those in education, training and library fields.
Tightened job markets for doctoral candidates in higher education, another bastion of faded glamour, has led to a wave of organizing among graduate students. Last year, the National Labor Relations Board withdrew a ruling that would have prohibited student workers at private universities from unionizing. Strikes followed at Columbia, Harvard and New York University. Just this week, graduate students at M.I.T. voted in favor of representation by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.
Looked at from a certain angle, social media offers a despairing window into the lives of older writers, editors, stylists and others in contracted creative fields, some of whom had been well-known at glossy magazines and have left New York, downsized, taken hourly wage work or resorted to GoFundMe to cover health care costs when serious illness strikes.
“Every worker knows that as they age, they are at risk of management finding them less relevant,” Jenny Singer, a staff writer at Glamour told me. “I’m 28, and I have a part-time job to supplement my income. I wouldn’t be homeless without it, but it gives me peace. This salary isn’t sustainable at all if I wanted to have a child. A living wage means being able to have a family, to exist as a regular person who might have debt or might be caring for an elderly family member. It doesn’t mean being an able-bodied 28-year-old on your parents’ health insurance.”