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

Work won’t love you back, so why are we still trying to find fulfilment in our 9–5? at Marie Claire UK

I was featured in Marie Claire UK in a really lovely article by Kate McCusker. She writes:

A sacred (and conveniently shareable) phrase of the peppy influencer: “Do something you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

To that, labour journalist and author of Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, has something to say. In fact, she has several things to say, and says them over the course of 279 (375 if you count notes, acknowledgements and index) perfectly paced pages. Jaffe’s question is simple: why are we so devoted to our jobs, when they yield very little in return? But her argument is nuanced, carefully researched and devastatingly convincing as to why we should all stop trying to find fulfilment in the daily grind.

Read the whole thing at Marie Claire UK

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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Why You Don’t Feel as Fulfilled From Your Job as You Think You Should at Time

­­Eliana Dockterman interviewed me about Work Won’t Love You Back for Time magazine. Here’s a clip:

Work Won’t Love You Back is a provocative title for book coming out at a time when many Americans are logging extra hours during the pandemic. But author Sarah Jaffe, whose book hits shelves on Jan. 26, argues that the “love your work” mantra is a myth of capitalism.

For most of human history workers clocked into their jobs knowing that “work sucked.” But in the 1970s, just when manufacturing began to die and labor movements began to lose ground, bosses started handing down aphorisms like, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Service people were told to plaster a smile onto their faces. Unpaid internships proliferated. And when women entered the workforce en masse looking for a paycheck, they were offered less money than their male peers. After all, their bosses argued, they should be grateful for the non-monetary rewards. “Even as the old story–that housework, and particularly motherhood, was inherently satisfying­­–hung on, the new myth, of work-as-liberation, grew up around it,” she writes. That pay gap has persisted.

In her book, Jaffe, a longtime labor journalist, says large corporations specifically conjured this fable in order to pay workers less and give them fewer benefits. The capitalist system, she says, depends on you believing that deception.

Read the whole thing at Time
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Work Won’t Love You Back: why it’s time to ditch the ‘labour of love’ approach at Stylist

I spoke to Lauren Geall at Stylist magazine about Work Won’t Love You Back. She wrote:

Essentially, at a time where we’re giving more and more of ourselves to our jobs, we’re getting less back.

This is a problem which Sarah Jaffe aptly highlights in her new book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone. According to Jaffe, the ‘labour of love’ myth that society has come to subscribe to is directly correlated to the problems so many workers are now facing.

“It’s exhausting, isn’t it?” Jaffe tells Stylist. “We’re told this story that our jobs will be exciting and fulfilling and we should be grateful to have them – but at the same time, they’re also making us nuts. How does that square up?”

Read the whole thing at Stylist
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Against Loving Your Job at In These Times

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.
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

In “Work Won’t Love You Back,” Sarah Jaffe Kills the Dream Job, at Bitch Magazine

Mary Retta at Bitch Media reviewed Work Won’t Love You Back (and I think this might be the best headline I’m gonna get). She writes:

In this way, Sarah Jaffe’s recent book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, released on January 26, is arriving at the perfect time. Told from the perspective of dozens of workers in various industries and fields including retail, education, and technology, Jaffe—the author of 2016’s Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt—examines and critiques the “labor of love” ideology that insists if we’re passionate about work, we’re not working at all. Each of the book’s chapters examines a particular professional industry where Jaffe both interviews workers within those fields and analyzes what labor has historically looked like in the field. The work is bookended by an introduction and a conclusion that both examine the themes of labor and love more conceptually, urging the reader to consider whether they really “love” their job or if capitalism has conditioned them to. Though the book has many strengths, Jaffe’s greatest success is her ability to deliver the final blow to the “dream job” narrative that has pervaded mainstream cultural norms for years.

Read the whole thing at Bitch.
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Service with a Smile at The Progressive

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

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Press Work Won't Love You Back

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and (Not) Love My Job at The Progressive

Amy Pedulla reviewed Work Won’t Love You Back for The Progressive. She writes:

Jaffe offers a sweeping historical and sociological study of work, labor, and the emotional toll these things have taken on the development of humankind. She relies on sources as wide-ranging as the ancient Greeks and Angela Davis to talk about various case studies like the underbelly of Walmart, to the unionization efforts of the company Storycorps, to the story of an unpaid intern who worked on director Darren Aronovsky’s film Black Swan, just to name a few. 

The book is also both structurally ambitious, combining essays on very specific industries such as domestic work, teaching, retail, nonprofits, art, academic, tech, sports, and of particular note, interns as it is a narrative feat. In each chapter, Jaffe spends time interviewing sources with memorable struggles in their relative industries.

The most lucid moments in Jaffe’s writing come in the form of her blunt redefinitions of commonplace ideas. There are several of these brilliant sentences throughout the pages: “The labor of love, of short, is a con”; “Charity is a relationship of power”; and “programming, a field currently dominated by young men, was invented by a woman,” to name a few. Her take on how interns are told to work for free on the promise of future employment perhaps hit the hardest: “What really defines the intern, after all, is hope.” 

Read the whole thing at The Progressive.
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Hate Your Job? We’ve Got The Book For You at Bustle

Greta Rainbow at Bustle interviewed me about Work Won’t Love You Back. She writes:

Work sucks. Whether you’re in a corporate job, a member of the gig economy, or a creative type, all jobs come with their own unique set of drawbacks. But reporter Sarah Jaffe’s new book Work Won’t Love You Back posits the question: does it have to feel this bad? Nearly 75% of workers experience burnout, and women are more likely than men to feel its defining characteristics: mental and physical exhaustion, inefficiency, and cynicism. (And these numbers were from before the pandemic.)

Yet in spite of these harrowing statistics, the trendiest way to keep employees working is the myth that work is the thing we love. That our self-worth can be derived from logging long hours and going above and beyond with our tasks. Or as the cheerful clickbait advice puts it, “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” And because of this, many of us never stop working, even as our passions and interests are funneled into performing tasks that benefit corporate bottom lines more than our personal growth.

Read the whole thing at Bustle
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

The Rise of One of the First Video Game Workers Unions at Wired

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
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Love, Labor, Lost at The American Prospect

Lauren Kaori Gurley reviewed Work Won’t Love You Back for The American Prospect. She writes:

Jaffe’s solution again is found in collective action, with a joyfully militant moment in the winter of 2019 when tens of thousands of unpaid interns marched in the streets of Quebec to demand a fair wage and formal recognition under the law. Part of the problem with the internship setup is that interns, who are not technically employees, have no formal processes to report sexual harassment or discrimination. These Canadian interns, Jaffe writes, “questioned why certain jobs were well-paid while others were undervalued, and they challenged the rules of behavior that taught young workers, most of them women, to be meek and retiring and always ready to serve.”

As a journalist myself, I can thank my union, the Writers Guild of America, East, and the organizing of my colleagues who came before me for most of the good things about my job—my annual salary increases, my editorial freedom, my six-week severance package if I get laid off, and my relatively inexpensive health and dental insurance.

Should this “labor of love” myth be put to an end? Jaffe says it’s complicated. As long as humans live under capitalism, ordinary people don’t have much of a choice but to continue spending the majority of our waking hours at work to sustain our lives. Workers across the board—interns, public-school teachers, even Google engineers—should take every opportunity they have to organize and demand less time at work and more free time for pleasure, relaxation, and personal growth with friends, family, lovers, and neighbors. As Jaffe writes, “Work will never love us back. But other people will.”

Read the whole thing at the Prospect