Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

by Sarah Jaffe

Overview

An “indispensable” (Nation) examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.

You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life."

In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth—the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries, Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work. Once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781568589374
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	01/18/2022
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Sarah Jaffe is a journalist covering the politics of power. She is the author of Necessary Trouble and From the Ashes, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the American Prospect, and many other publications. She is a columnist at In These Times and The Progressive and the co-host of the Heart Reacts podcast.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition ix

Introduction. Welcome to the Working Week 1

Part 1 What We Might Call Love

Chapter 1 Nuclear Fallout: The Family 21

Chapter 2 Just Like One of the Family: Domestic Work 55

Chapter 3 We Strike Because We Care: Teaching 83

Chapter 4 Service with a Smile: Retail 111

Chapter 5 Suffer for the Cause: Nonprofits 139

Part 2 Enjoy What You Do!

Chapter 6 My Studio Is the World: Art 175

Chapter 7 Hoping for Work: Interns 207

Chapter 8 Proletarian Professionals: Academia 231

Chapter 9 Playbor of Love: Technology 263

Chapter 10 It's All Fun and Games: Sports 291

Conclusion. What Is Love? 321

Acknowledgments 337

Notes 343

Index 403

Reading Group Guide 421

Editorial Reviews

Illuminating and inspiring…Work Won’t Love You Back is ultimately an optimistic book. Jaffe is clear-eyed about all the ways employers exploit workers’ goodwill, but because she has spent so much time reporting on labor actions across the world, she has also seen how workers use love to their advantage in organizing.”—New Republic

“An indispensable guide to the broader dynamics of work in the contemporary moment….an astute assessment of the conditions of work today and a glimpse of a future in which we’d have a different relationship with work altogether…Combining reportage with theoretical inquiry, Work Won’t Love You Back is at once a dispatch on the conditions of work in the United States today, an examination of a burgeoning class consciousness within a new working class, and a Marxist-feminist disquisition on the role of emotion in labor.”—Nation

“An extremely timely analysis of how we arrived at these brutal inequalities and of some of the ways in which a deliberately atomised workforce is beginning to organise to challenge them.”—Guardian

“Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back is a study of modern employment trends that reads like a cross between a PhD thesis, a 19th-century novel about the working poor and a dating manual (which could be titled: “Work’s Just Not That Into You”). Through a series of case studies of American and British “labourers of love” – a teacher, an artist, a woman who works in an abortion clinic, etc – Jaffe investigates the origins of the idea of work as a calling, ie something you do for “self-actualisation” as opposed to mere pay.”—New Statesman

“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…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.”—Progressive

“Jaffe and the workers she interviews help us make sense of the messy tangle of emotions so many of us feel about our professional lives; when the lines are blurred between work and play, as Jaffe so astutely explains and historicizes for us, they are simply the messy tangle of emotions about our lives, full stop. The final chapter of Work Won’t Love You Back is at once a brilliant contribution to the growing canon of anti-work political theory and a moving ode to human connection.”—Baffler

“The prose is crisp and compulsively readable… a deeply engaging work.”
 —Indypendent

“It reports in depth about the ways our work and life Venn diagrams have been manipulated into something more like a single circle, and offers clues as to how we might change that. It could not be more timely.”—Progressive Populist

“An important, timely reminder of the meaning of work.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Work Won't Love You Back brilliantly chronicles the transformation of work into a labor of love, demonstrating how this seemingly benign narrative is wreaking havoc on our lives, communities, and planet. By pulling apart the myth that work is love, Jaffe shows us that we can reimagine futures built on care, rather than exploitation. A tremendous contribution.”—Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine

“A much-needed intervention into a bad relation: our employment. Neoliberalism is collapsing, and you’ll find no better guide to help sift through the wreckage than this book.”—Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia

“Sarah Jaffe’s years as a labor reporter have let her see frontlines where others have failed to look. A book of rare importance.”—Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing

“Marvelously lucid, thoroughly readable, and wonderfully engaging.”—Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work

“A multiplex in still life; a stunning critique of capitalism, a collective conversation on the meaning of life and work, and a discerning contribution to the demands of the future society everyone deserves.”—Jane McAlevey, author of No Shortcuts

“Jaffe’s committed, on-the-ground engagement, historical range, and ferocious gathering of revolutionary thought combines to create something genuine and profound. . . . This book is a gift to its reader, and to a possible future.”—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

“A dazzling takedown of the myth of working for love, and a call to arms for workers to invest their love and solidarity not in their jobs but in each other.”—Molly Crabapple, artist and author of Drawing Blood

“An indispensable addition to labor journalism, labor history, and much more broadly, our understanding of what resistance looks like—and could look like—in these difficult times.”—Dave Zirin, author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States

“Sassy and big-hearted, learned and astute. …A stunning achievement."—Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

From the Publisher

A stunning critique of capitalism, a collective conversation on the meaning of life and work, and a discerning contribution to the demands of the future society everyone deserves.”

author of A Collective Bargain Jane McAlevey

Jaffe’s committed, on-the-ground engagement, historical range, and ferocious gathering of revolutionary thought combines to create something genuine and profound.”

author of Confessions of the Fox Jordy Rosenberg

An extremely timely analysis of how we arrived at these brutal inequalities and of some of the ways in which a deliberately atomised workforce is beginning to organize to challenge them.”

The Guardian (London)

By pulling apart the myth that work is love, Jaffe shows us that we can reimagine futures built on care, rather than exploitation.”

New York Times bestselling author Naomi Klein

Jaffe is clear-eyed about all the ways employers exploit workers’ goodwill, but…she has also seen how workers use love to their advantage in organizing.”

New Republic

Jaffe’s exhaustive research, expressed in crisp and lucid sentences, is served well by her high-quality narration.”

AudioFile

2020-10-27
A welcome cri de coeur against the soulless machinery of late capitalism.

While Jaffe admits that her freelance employment often involves financial scrambling—“I don’t have an employer that pays for my health insurance, and forget about retirement benefits. Vacation? What’s that?”—she enjoys more freedom than many Americans, even if she begins her argument with an extended refutation of the notion that if you do what you love, “you’ll never work a day in your life,” a hollow mantra that substitutes for the reality that most of us work longer and harder than ever before for less money. The author attacks the fetishization of work brought to the world courtesy of neoliberalism, “a set of choices made by the winning side in a series of struggles”—not to mention the economic doctrine born of the fascist coup that overthrew the socialist government of Chile’s duly elected president, Salvador Allende, in 1973. As Jaffe astutely points out, the subsequent Thatcherism and Reaganism were just Pinochet with a somewhat friendlier face. Neoliberalism also assumes, as did earlier brands of capitalism, that women’s work is less valuable than men’s, a notion that still prevails. It also gives primacy to the unpaid internship as a means of securing free labor. “The internship advanced alongside other forms of contingent work,” writes the author, “and alongside the idea that trading in security for enjoyable work was a deal worth making.” Even highly desirable jobs such as a tenured professorship have become precarious. In a nice turn of phrase, Jaffe writes that even as the vaunted “knowledge economy” came into being, “the labor of knowledge workers was being devalued and deskilled.” The book is long on description and short on solution, but Jaffe does suggest, soundly, that as the current economy cracks along its fissures, it affords room to imagine something better.

Working people of all stripes have much to learn from this book.

Kirkus Reviews