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

Love and Labour at Not9to5

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
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

“There is no such thing as the ‘dignity of work’” at The New Statesman

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
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Do You Enjoy What You Do? at Dissent

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

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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Love (for work) will tear us apart at AJ Plus

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 bookWork 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.
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Suffering for the Cause: an interview on Work Won’t Love You Back at ReproJobs

The good folks at Reprojobs, an outlet for workers in the reproductive health movement, interviewed me about Work Won’t Love You Back and particularly about my nonprofits chapter, which tells the story of a worker who was part of the union drive at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. They write:

YOUR BOOK EXPLORES THE HISTORY OF THE EXPLOITATION OF WORKERS, ORGANIZED LABOR, AND THEIR INTERSECTION WITH RACISM, CLASSISM, SEXISM, AND XENOPHOBIA. WE KNOW THAT SO MANY OF THE ISSUES IMPACTING REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM STEM FROM THESE OPPRESSIONS, AS WELL AS LABOR INEQUITY, BUT SO FEW WORKERS IN REPRO SEE THEMSELVES AS PART OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT OR LABOR ORGANIZING FOR THEMSELVES. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS? IN THE BOOK, YOU EXPLAIN THE HISTORY OF NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS BEGINNING AS CHARITY WORK DONE BY WEALTHY NON-WAGE EARNING WHITE WOMEN AS A HOBBY AND THEN DESCRIBE ITS TRANSFORMATION INTO THE TAX HAVENS FOR CORPORATIONS AND CAPITALISTS WE SEE TODAY, ALSO KNOWN AS THE ‘NONPROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.’ THE REALITY IS THAT MANY OF OUR ORGANIZATIONS’ BOARDS AND FUNDING SOURCES ARE STILL DIRECTED BY PHILANTHROPISTS WHO ARE REMOVED FROM THE LIVED EXPERIENCES OF THE PEOPLE WE SERVE, OUR OWN EXPERIENCES AS WORKERS, AND UPHOLD THE RACIST AND CLASSIST SYSTEM CREATING THIS WHOLE MESS.

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

The Life and Death of the Dream Job at The Baffler

The wonderful Raechel Anne Jolie (whose book, Rust Belt Femme, I devoured in nearly one sitting) has written about Work Won’t Love You Back for The Baffler and I couldn’t be more thrilled. She writes:

The book contains original reporting interwoven with keen analysis of and remarkably thorough histories behind several different, but related, kinds of labor, including domestic care work (both hired and familial), public school teaching, non-profit staffing, academia, art, sports, and tech. Jaffe talks with people who were initially drawn to their jobs because they felt a genuine commitment to, or derived pleasure or purpose from, the work. Throughout these interviews, we bear witness to the complicated emotional stress of feeling passionate about work that is simultaneously exploitative and alienating.

This contradiction, Jaffe explains, although increasingly common, is a relatively new one. We haven’t always tried to find meaning in paid labor, and in fact a central struggle of the early labor movement was to reduce the number of hours we spent on the job. “The labor movement’s earliest demands were usually for less work . . . ” Jaffe reminds us. “The strike, the workers’ best weapon, is, after all, a refusal of work, and for a while they wielded it effectively, winning some concessions on the length of the working day and week as well as on wages.”

As a working-poor Boomer, my mom wasn’t conditioned to seek love in work. She had (and still has) a love for reading, craft-making, and family. She never had a passion for serving drinks at the Brown Derby, delivering newspapers at 3 a.m., serving cafeteria food, hauling ink cartridges in a print shop, or working for below minimum wage to do home health care. But I am from the post-Reagan generation, in which, Jaffe says, “it’s become especially important that we believe that the work itself is something to love.” When in 2003 I made it to college—with the help of above-the-poverty-line relatives, good grades, and a contract signing me up for decades of debt—I felt certain that it was a guaranteed path to escaping the menial labor I both performed and witnessed growing up. Even my burgeoning post-9/11 radical politics didn’t stop me from buying into the dominant narrative that college secured upward mobility. I think I needed to buy it—the idea that college wouldn’t be my ticket to “fulfilling work” was too much to bear. And so I did what I was told to do by posters in guidance counselor offices and bumper stickers on cars: “Follow your bliss”; “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”; and other messages that promised me my fate wouldn’t be the same as others from my blue-collar town.

Read the whole thing (it’s so good!) at The Baffler.
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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. 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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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Work Is Just Not That Into You at the Saturday Evening Post

I spoke to Nicholas Gilmore at the Saturday Evening Post about Work Won’t Love You Back, class composition, what we might do with our free time, and, it turns out, a lot about Bette Davis. He wrote:

“The thing about common sense is that it’s often wrong,” Sarah Jaffe writes in her recent book Work Won’t Love You Back. In the book — part labor history, part collection of profiles of workers — Jaffe takes aim at some entrenched American ideas about the daily grind.

Many of us were raised to aspire to turn our passion into a paycheck, but Jaffe writes that the whole notion of work as something we enjoy spending our time doing is rather new. Even if there is joy in the work, she says that this can often blur the line between labor and love in a way that rarely benefits workers.

Tracing the ways we work — and who gets compensated for it — from pre-industrial times to today’s video game designers and striking teachers, Jaffe makes a case for a renewed telling of an old story of labor, and perhaps a revival of an old strategy to solve our collective work woes.

Read the whole thing at the Saturday Evening Post.
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Freedom and leisure for everyone at Die Zeit

Lukas Hermsmeier wrote a long, thoughtful piece about Work Won’t Love You Back alongside Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work and Eva von Redecker’s Revolution for Life. In German, but also available in English! He writes:

What makes Jaffe’s analysis so interesting is that it merges the swelling mantra of love your work with the increasing fragmentation and precariousness of the world of work. Jaffe explains that the pressure to love one’s work, to even feel realized through it, is, to the extent that it is today, a phenomenon of the post-industrial age. Even long before that, as Max Weber pointed out at the beginning of the 20th century , the capitalist world of work had been shaped by Protestant ethics; and in the Fordist economy, too, the workers had been battered and the roles were unjustly distributed according to gender. It was only neoliberalism, however, writes Jaffe, “that tried to give us not freedom from work, but through work.”

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

What’s Love Got to Do With It? On Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back at Unemployed Negativity

Jason Read at Unemployed Negativity wrote a lovely post about Work Won’t Love You Back. It’s really good–I encourage you to read the whole thing. He writes:

There is a dialectic of sorts between bullshit jobs and hope labor. The more the general labor situation seems plagued by demanding and demeaning jobs the more people are driven to find something with passion and purpose. This is an escape from work on the terrain of work itself, an escape from the cubicle to the coffeeshop or, worse yet, the corporate co-working space. On the opposite side of this dialectic, those stuck in jobs that are not perceived as difficult or demanding have no sympathy for those who work doing something perceived as fun, rewarding, or meaningful. Case in point the hostility shown towards teachers. As Jaffe has said in an interview, unless you are a coal miner there is supposedly no reason for forming a union. This conflict  undermines any solidarity across the affective divide. I imagine a book on the difficulties of teachers, artists, and athletes will be met with derision by many–“what do they have to complain about?” or “If they wanted more money they should have gone into a more lucrative career.” For this reason alone Jaffe should be celebrated for writing this book. It is hard enough to criticize work in our society, hardy still when it is a matter of criticizing jobs that people love.

Read the whole thing.