Tag: reviews

An interesting little plug for WWLYB in the A.V. Club, where Katie Rife is considering her time at work in the last slide of an otherwise inane clickbait slideshow. She writes:

If you told me two years ago that my last published piece for The A.V. Club would be a slideshow, I’d say, “We don’t do slideshows. Readers don’t like them.” How things change. But it’s been a weird, wonderful ride nevertheless.

I’m really not inclined to get too maudlin, given the way things have played out over the past couple of months. But I will say this. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the current movement to reframe work, and the perils of tying your self-image to your career the way that I have over the past seven years. (If you’re also in a period of soul searching, I recommend reading Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe.)

Read the whole thing here

Lara Williams at the Guardian included Work Won’t Love You Back on a fun list of books–fiction and nonfiction–about work sucking. She included mine and Amelia Horgan’s Lost in Work together (a happy connection), and writes:

7. Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe and Lost in Work by Amelia Horgan
Two absolutely essential non-fiction books which interrogate modern narratives surrounding work. Featuring an array of case studies from all walks of life, Work Won’t Love You Back examines the myth that work should be done for love not money, and questions the lack of validity or compensation afforded particular kinds of work (domestic labour, art). Lost in Work queries a different myth about work: that we all have access to flexible, exciting and fast-paced employment, when what is really happening is a blurring of the lines between work and pleasure (“leisure treated as something we should make profitable; each hobby a potential ‘side gig’.”).

Read the whole thing here.

Alyssa Battistoni wrote a long, thoughtful essay for The Nation about Work Won’t Love You Back, Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work, the Great Resignation, and capitalist stagnation. She writes:

Jaffe’s vision of post-work politics is more clearly rooted in her descriptions of how workers are organizing today, and she places more faith in the potential of their agency to remake the world. Utopia is present in her writing too, but it emerges concretely, when people act together in ways that challenge the structures of daily life. These moments of possibility can appear in unexpected places. Although they are often associated with autonomous movements like Occupy Wall Street that explicitly seek to disrupt the rhythms of everyday life, Jaffe points out that they also appear in more “organized” forms of action, like teachers’ strikes. We can even generate such moments when we imagine our lives otherwise: “What would you do with your time if you didn’t have to work?” she likes to ask. Such utopian moments won’t abolish capitalism, Jaffe acknowledges. But the projects that generate them give us a glimpse of alternatives and, most important, create the kinds of bonds among people that can drive struggles forward. Political power can only emerge, partially and unevenly, out of actual experiences and relationships—the kinds of relationships of solidarity and, yes, love, that organizing can create and sustain.

Read the whole thing at The Nation

Lukas Moe includes Work Won’t Love You Back in his piece on academic “Quit Lit.” He writes:

Miserable protagonists and narrators are fashionable, but there is no frisson of autofiction in quit lit. What happens instead is slow and wrenching and sad.

For this, Jaffe’s book is a tonic. Jaffe’s style is that of someone who spends time with working people: curious about their particular experiences doing a job, fluent in the historical causes of that job’s depredations of self-worth, but impatient with overly fine distinctions. Work sucks, as we used to say, and we should learn how to say it again. The sectoral logic of the book’s chapters, ranging from home-care nurses to software engineers, insists that collective action is key to the possibility of good enough work. Instead of wringing hands about the death of the academic idyll, for example, what if we focused more on the overlaps between academic and service work, its survival strategies as well as its traps?

Read the whole thing at the LARB.

Rithika Ramamurthy reviewed Work Won’t Love You Back and Amelia Horgan’s Lost in Work at Lux. She writes:

Anti-work writing is at its best when it inspires us to fight for a future that we can control and to organize towards that vision in the present. Without this double-pronged strategy, we will be left with short-term solutions and long-term immiseration. Jaffe and Horgan understand this, as they both insist that the only way forward is to organize the overworked sectors that do the difficult work of sustaining society. Their attention to care work in particular, and the feminized quality of the majority of modern work, is precisely what allows them to be clear-eyed about the capitalist tendency to turn even social reproduction into exploitable activity. Horgan’s proposed method of escaping capitalism is a “powerful and reinvigorated trade union movement,” while Jaffe declares that beyond stronger labor laws and workplace improvements, we need a “political understanding that our lives are ours to do with what we will.”

Read the whole thing at Lux.

Work Won’t Love You Back is one of 11 work-life balance books at Bookriot. They write:

Listen. That old “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” saying is baloney. It’s why many of us are feeling burned out and exploited. Your work is not your family. Exposure doesn’t pay the bills. Sarah Jaffe eviscerates the notion of your job being “a labor of love,” or being driven by passion rather than pay. Work Won’t Love You Back is the book we all need in our lives if we want any semblance of a work–life balance.

Read the whole thing at Bookriot.

The Times of London chose Work Won’t Love You Back as one of its best business books of the year:

Nothing in life is more satisfying than quitting a job that you loathe. Yet a strange expectation has arisen in the opposite direction: that you should adore the nine-to-five. This relationship is entirely one-sided, as anyone who has slogged tirelessly at work only to get the boot can testify. Jaffe’s timely and punchy book explores how we’ve been sold a dud dream: told to find fulfilment and meaning from work, while job security evaporates and working conditions deteriorate.

Check it out.

Powell’s Books chose Work Won’t Love You Back as one of its best nonfiction books of 2021.

Over the past 19+ months, think pieces, op-eds, surveys, analyses, and general hand-wringing about “burnout” have been impossible to avoid. Articles suggesting cures ranging from vacation time and therapy, to bubble baths and “mindfulness” have proliferated wildly as reporters and employers have rushed to counteract the condition credited with causing “The Great Resignation.” But no one has explained how we got here better than Jaffe.

You can check it out there and also buy the book from them!