I spoke with Natalia Savalyeva at OpenDemocracy about Work Won’t Love You Back, and quoted comrade Patrick Blanchfield on “the future sucks.” She writes:

Twenty years into the 21st century, most people in the west want to have a job that they love. And, vice versa, we expect that this love – our inspiration, devotion and care – will provide us with deep fulfillment, even satisfaction with who we are as individuals and how we lead our lives.

Yet very often the opposite happens: the “love what you do” principle supports the exploitation and devaluation of labour, as well as cutting back on social protection and welfare guarantees. You can love your work, but as US labour journalist Sarah Jaffe reminds us in her new book, it won’t love you back.

In Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone, Jaffe draws on her deep experience reporting on workplace organising in the US to explore why love is not a necessary component of our jobs, how the whole idea of the “labour of love” brought us to the edge of global crises, and how we can change it for the better – by fighting for our rights as workers, and changing how our societies are organised socially, politically and economically.

Read the whole thing at OpenDemocracy

Another Italian interview! And a good moment to tell you that Work Won’t Love You Back will be translated into Italian and published in Italy by Minimum Fax. More details when I have them! But in the meantime, I spoke with Irene Doda for Il Tascabile and you can read it in Italian or click the little translate button and read in English too. An excerpt:

Precisely this “work of love” is the theme of the essay by American journalist Sarah Jaffe entitled Work Won’t Love You Back – which can be translated as “The work does not return your love”, forthcoming by minimum fax. Jaffe follows the story of the labor of love starting with those typically female tasks in the Fordist economic framework: domestic work and care work. But from the feminized nursing professions such as babysitting, to the role of teachers, to third sector and art professionals, Jaffe reconstructs the role of love and dedication in the neoliberal economy, to arrive at defining emotions as an everlasting sphere. more present and decisive in wage labor. The “work of love” makes workers potentially blackmailable, precisely by virtue of the devotion to their profession. We discussed with Sarah Jaffe about various themes that cross her essay, to reflect on how to frame the phenomenon of the labor of love in the contemporary world. 

Read the whole thing at Il Tascabile

I chatted with Lena Eckert-Erdheim at The Forge to talk about what inspired her new book, the work of organizing, and the urgency of transforming the way that we think and feel about work. An excerpt:

There’s a difference between the dignity of work and the dignity of workers.

Right. Exactly. And also, there are a lot of people who can’t work. There are a lot of people who are unemployed right now because half of capitalism is shut down. There are a lot of people who have disabilities, who are ill, who are old, who are retired, who are children, who cannot, should not, do not need to work and are also still dignified human beings. This idea that you’re only worth something if you work, we’ve seen where that gets us. It gets us the lieutenant governor of Texas saying grandma would be happy to die to keep capitalism going. It gets us denying prisoners COVID vaccines because they’re not productive citizens. It leads to people justifying people dying of COVID because they already had a disability or an illness. I don’t think fetishizing work gets us anywhere good, and that’s stuff that I’ve learned from disability rights movements, elder’s rights movements, and prison abolitionists.

Read the rest at The Forge.

Elinor Potts interviewed me about Work Won’t Love You Back for Not9to5. She writes:

With the boundaries of work and life increasingly muddled as we work from home through the pandemic, many of us have found ourselves increasingly committed to working as a distraction. As Autonomy reported in their ‘blueprint for the new normal’ report, which we blogged about back in January, 80% of overtime carried out from home goes unpaid, compared to 60% of office work, and during the pandemic, the average workday increased by 8.2% – nearly 50 minutes.  

Exploring the root of our compulsion to work and the realities of emotionally demanding labour, Elinor chatted with Journalist and Author Sarah Jaffe following the recent publication of her new book, Work Won’t Love You Back. 

Read the whole thing at Not9to5

I spoke with the excellent George Eaton at The New Statesman about Work Won’t Love You Back, punk rock, shitty jobs, dignity and where it comes from, and how hope, as Mariame Kaba says, is a discipline. He writes:

“We get tripped up with this idea of the ‘dignity of work’,” Jaffe told me. “The miners don’t have dignity because they’re miners, they have dignity because they’re human… If you tell people that the only thing that gives them dignity is their work, well, when we have millions of people applying for benefits what the hell have we just done to those people if we tell them their only worth is working?”

Jaffe, who describes herself with justification as a “labour journo before it was cool”, said that she was politicised by “punk rock and shitty jobs”. She spoke of the influence of her late Jewish father, who owned restaurants and a bicycle shop (“he was very clear that no one would hire him”) and quipped: “Who wants to have a boss anyway?”

“He didn’t quite accept that I was going to take that politically in the direction that I did,” Jaffe reflected. “I’m trying to abolish everyone’s boss.”

Read the whole thing at The New Statesman

I sat down like an actual human for a real life chat with Natasha Lewis from Dissent to talk about Work Won’t Love You Back (outdoors, in the cold but still worth it) and you can read the interview now. She writes:

Natasha Lewis: You’re a labor journalist, so you spend a lot of time covering labor struggles, but a lot of the people you write about in this book don’t have unions. Could you tell me a bit about that choice?

Sarah Jaffe: In some of these cases it’s people who can’t have unions, right? I start out with a mom. The artists that I talk about are trying to form an artists’ union, but there isn’t really one for them to be part of. So, in those cases, that’s the story: how do you organize when you are aren’t really recognized as needing or deserving a union?

In other cases, they’re in organizations like United for Respect and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, where they’re organizing as workers, but they’re not proper union members. Others are founding members of new unions like the game workers, or the hockey players who are forming their worker organization.

This is what the workforce looks like now: a whole bunch of people who don’t have access to traditional unions, don’t have access to organizing help, and don’t have traditional-looking workplaces.

Read the whole thing at Dissent

Sarah Leonard interviewed me about Work Won’t Love You Back for AJ+’s newsletter, subtext. She writes:

Sarah Jaffe (@sarahljaffe) is a writer and journalist who chronicles social movements: how they rise and fall, and the social relationships that underlie them. Few have done as much to chronicle the rise of the left and of a new generation of labor organizing over the last decade.

Jaffe has long cast a critical eye on the way we talk about work. Her most recent book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, is a work of reporting and ideas in the tradition of journalist-analysts like Barbara Ehrenreich. I talked to Jaffe on a Friday afternoon, when, it’s fair to say, we were both a little exhausted with work. 

Read the whole thing (and subscribe!) at subtext.