In These Times ran an excerpt from Work Won’t Love You Back‘s conclusion. Here’s a clip:

Work itself no longer works. Wages have stagnated for most working people since Reagan and Thatcher’s time. A college degree no longer guarantees a middle-class job. The pandemic exposed the failures of the U.S. healthcare system and the brutality of ​“essential” work for those who had no choice but to keep going to their jobs despite the heightened danger.

A society where we must work the majority of our waking hours will never deliver us happiness, even if we are the lucky few who have jobs in which we do gain some joy. As feminist activist and scholar Silvia Federici wrote, ​“Nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.”

Read the whole thing at In These Times.

The Progressive ran an excerpt from Work Won’t Love You Back. Here’s a clip:

Ann Marie Reinhart didn’t intend to spend half her life working in retail. It just sort of happened that way.

“I have always worked. I have worked two and three jobs,” she explains in a series of interviews. She had left her position in medical billing right before her first child was born, and hadn’t quite figured out what was next. A few months after her son’s birth, she stopped by a Toys “R” Us store and saw a “Now Hiring” sign. They hired her on the spot for the holidays. That was 1988.

“I had no aspirations of being a permanent cashier or working in retail. It was definitely not on my bucket list,” Reinhart says with a laugh.

Read the whole thing at The Progressive

Wired ran an excerpt from Work Won’t Love You Back. Here’s a clip:

VIDEO GAME PROGRAMMERS learn to celebrate “crunch” from the get-go. Like many of his peers, Kevin Agwaze went to a specialized school that taught coding for games, rather than a traditional university. Such schools normalize a brutal workweek, treating high dropout rates as a badge of honor, and instilling the idea that the games industry is a shark tank where only the strong survive. While in his native Germany, he noted, “Uni is free,” the program he attended, a two-year course, costs around €25,000 (about US $29,000). Such programs can cost even more in the United States, where a specialized education might run $100,000.

Read the whole thing at Wired