The material conditions of young workers in the US are plummeting, and everyone can see it. Even the most pro-capitalist, right-wing members of the Epstein class are saying it.

“If you proletarianize the young people,” said arch billionaire Peter Thiel last year, “you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”

Or as MAGA “populist” and disgraced Epstein confidant Steve Bannon said in 2018: “People under 35 years old, the millennials, please understand one thing. You are nothing but serfs. You don’t own anything and you’re not going to own anything … You’re just going to be on the continual wheel of the gig economy, two paychecks away from financial ruin.”

Well, they’re right about that one.

A recent Gallup study shows that job market pessimism is growing across the board in the US. For the first time, more workers (49%) reported “struggling” in their lives, than “thriving” (46%).

Confidence in the job market has plummeted by 42% since 2022, hitting a record low, with only 28% of workers reporting that now is a good time to find a job. Of those who do have jobs, over half are actively seeking or watching for new jobs.

Young, college-educated workers are feeling the strain more acutely than others, and are the most pessimistic about the job market.

It’s the worst job market for this layer of the working class in over a decade, setting aside the severe but brief 2020 collapse. At the end of 2025, the unemployment rate for college grads aged 22–27 rose to 5.6%, the highest level since February 2015, barring 2020. For college-educated workers overall, it’s the highest jobless rate since January 2015, while for young workers overall, it’s the highest since February 2018.

The unemployment rate for recent college grads has exceeded the country’s overall jobless rate for five years in a row—something that has never happened before.

Meanwhile, 40% of recent grads are stuck in jobs that don’t typically require college degrees. Those who left their “temporary” and “entry-level” minimum-wage jobs to pursue a degree graduated with student loan debt, only to return to working full time at the same jobs that they left.

The recent wave of “mega-layoffs” in tech and other white-collar sectors means even wider layers of “comfortable” jobs are not immune from the misery. But even before the tech layoffs, the labor market showed signs of cooling. The labor force participation rate—the share of the working-age population that’s either employed or looking for work—has been gradually declining since the early 2000s. It hit 61.9% in March 2026, the lowest level since 1977 excluding the pandemic. In 2025, polls revealed that true unemployment figures were significantly higher than official reports, and nearly one-fourth of the American labor force was functionally unemployed.

Last month, a Vox article analyzing why college-educated workers were turning left began by arguing that the “ensuing 17 decades [since the Communist Manifesto] weren’t kind to Marx’s prophecies,” but ended by noting that “AI could still prove Marx right” after all:

Capitalism still hasn’t turned educated professionals into immiserated proletarians—or unified the working class in opposition to the bourgeoisie.

 

This may be about to change. Certainly, AI poses a greater threat to knowledge workers’ class status than any previous technological breakthrough.