How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

a book by Sarah Jaffe
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

The Myth of “Loving What You Do” Has Ruined Modern Work for Everyone at Fatherly

I spoke with Lizzy Francis at Fatherly about Work Won’t Love You Back, care work, parenting, and collective action.

I spoke with Lizzy Francis at Fatherly about Work Won’t Love You Back, care work, parenting, and collective action. She writes:

“Love what you do, you will never work a day in your life.” Or so the old adage goes. That phrase has been pummeled into our heads — and is even the slogan for a popular co-working space, printed on t-shirts and hats, an ethos in and of itself. For most people, that phrase is a load of crap, and it’s a harmful load of crap, too. After all, as long as people wonder how to find a job you love, they’ll never actually step in to make the job that they have a better one. “Do what you love, love what you do” is a fantasy of modern work that keeps people from understanding the ways in which they could make work better for themselves and their coworkers.

After all, the implication that “loving what you do” carries is that if you find something that stokes your passion, then frustration anger, or the rat-race struggle to get that promotion won’t actually feel like, well, work. It also has the pernicious effect of making money and benefits secondary to that passion — rather than the benefit of work itself. This type of thinking, however, pervades the modern workplace. And it’s making work worse than ever. 

“Work is awful,” says Sarah Jaffe, labor reporter and author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Work was awful before the pandemic, and the pandemic has just made work even worse.”

In her new book, Jaffe traces the death of typical factory jobs and the rise of care work (from service industry jobs, which account for the majority of work, to health care work) and emotional labor to the rising attitude that employees should love what they do to make their livings. Jaffe says that emotional labor is the hallmark of most middle-class jobs — whether you work in an office or as a nurse.

While that’s perfectly fine, it has led to an expectation that everyone is passionate about their 9-5’s. This false notion makes it seem like the job — not the salary, not the benefits, not the ability to stay home with your kids — is the reward in and of itself. When the work becomes the reward, everyone gets screwed. We overwork, we get underpaid, and worst of all, we don’t see a way out. Parents, especially, are caught under the wheel that keeps turning.

Read the whole thing at Fatherly

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