Oscar Rickett at Vice UK interviewed me for this excellent piece on work’s changes and crappiness. I love it because he quotes me going on about Gramsci, but also because he talks about Oscar Wilde’s ideas on work. He writes:

“Our relationship to work can change under capitalism, because it has,” says the American journalist Sarah Jaffe, author of the forthcoming book Work Won’t Love You Back. “It can change. It might get worse.” Aidan Harper, researcher at the New Economics Foundation and co-author of The Case for a Four-Day Week, believes that cultural norms – “the natural conservatism that tends to believe that, if things change, it will be for the worse” – need to be overcome in order to bring about a shift in our attitude towards work.

….

Sarah Jaffe references the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci when she tells me that such assumptions are the product of history – material forces that shift with material conditions.

In the age of Fordism, Jaffe says, unionised American workers clocked in and clocked out. They didn’t have to pretend to love their work: it was often repetitive, but it paid pretty well and allowed for a decent standard of living. This was also deemed “men’s work”, and Jaffe sees a gendered change in the makeup of working class jobs today, with jobs in hospitals, social care and the service industry taking the place of heavy industry.

Today’s workplace, too, is defined by a culture that demands employees love what they do, buying into the company brand (one games company calls itself a “Fampany”) while being afforded far less job security. Either way, we are battling still against what the late Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”, the idea that, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “there is no alternative”.

In opposition to this, Jaffe’s book profiles a wide range of workers fighting for better conditions, and also shows how powerful the kind of hegemony Gramsci defined remains. Jaffe writes that she often asks people what they would do if they didn’t have to work, and that while she hears answers relating to spending more time with family and friends, or pursuing different interests, harassed workers tend to always return to the fact that a life without work is impossible and almost unthinkable.

Read the whole thing at Vice

Tom Gatti at the New Statesman included Work Won’t Love You Back in a list of essential 2021 reads. He writes:

Several other writers have also “gone big” this year with ambitious, ideas-rich books. One of the most keenly anticipated is The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, a young philosopher at All Souls, Oxford. Published by Bloomsbury in August, it is billed as “a landmark dismantling of the politics and ethics of sex in this world”. In Everybody (Picador, April), Olivia Laing tells the related story of the body and its fight for political freedom through 20th-century movements such as gay rights and feminism. Jan Lucassen’s The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind (Yale, July) feels timely as we adjust to a workplace transformed by the pandemic. Its themes are shared by several other titles including Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe (Hurst, January) and Why You Won’t Get Rich by Robert Verkaik (Oneworld, March).

Read More at The New Statesman

Jezebel’s Marie Solis interviewed me for this excellent piece about work, and how it sucks, and how this was the year we all started to think about that. She writes:

Sarah Jaffe refers to this idea as “workplace realism,” in her new book Work Won’t Love You Back. Riffing on Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism, Jaffe reminds the reader: We may work from home, work odd hours, have meetings over Zoom rather than in person, but on the macro level the idea that we should work no matter what has remained stubbornly intact. But, as Jaffe reminded me, the history of the labor movement in the U.S. is founded on fights for fewer hours and more time to spend as we wish. The struggle for the eight-hour workday we now consider standard (in theory if not in practice) might also have begun as a single seed of consciousness, a realization that spending the majority of our time at work is not natural.

Individual epiphanies about work—that one would rather do much less of it, or that one should at least be able to do it on one’s own terms—can become the foundation of collective movements. During the pandemic, workers have organized for better work conditions, gone on rent strike to demand that housing be recognized as a human right. The government has demonstrated that it has the ability to deposit $1,200 into the bank accounts of (most) Americans if there is the political will—fertile ground for agitating for a universal basic income. These are practical measures to materially improve people’s lives as well as important exercises in imagination: It is possible to alter the way we work.

“The crisis can make it much more obvious to us the ways work sucks but we still have to change it,” Jaffe said. “The realizations that people are coming to, the reckonings people are having with work, those are happening everywhere. What we do with them then is the next question.”

Read more at Jezebel

In Refinery29, Work Won’t Love You Back is one of 32 recommended books, and they write:

After reading this insightful look into how doing what you love can be a recipe for disaster you may want to get the words, “work won’t love you back,” stitched on a pillow so you don’t forget.

Read more at Refinery29

Jesse Bernstein at Philly blog Jewish Exponent calls Work Won’t Love You Back a must-read. He writes:

The title is true of everyone except for me. I am completely fulfilled by my work. So if you’re one of those people wondering about why works feels like that, check out the newest reported book from Jaffe, a Philadelphia native and Temple grad, to boot.

Read more at Jewish Exponent