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

a book by Sarah Jaffe
Event • London

BBC Woman’s Hour

I joined the BBC Woman’s Hour show to talk aboutĀ Work Won’t Love You BackĀ and the latest crisis of retail work.

Writer Sarah Jaffe joins Emma to talk about the ideas in her new book, Work Won’t Love You Back. She argues we’ve been sold an idea that certain work is not really work and should be done for the sake of passion rather than pay. She looks particularly at how gender and the labour of love myth interact, how the devaluing of work in the home has lead to a devaluing of certain work outside (eg childcare, domestic work, nursing, teachers etc) . She examines the notion that paid work is a liberation for women particularly when the amount of work women do in the home has not been significantly reduced. She asks how the unpaid intern came about, the overworked teacher, the boss who describes the work place as ‘like a family”, how the labour of love myth permeates almost every area of our lives and at what cost.