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Hate your job? Good! Loving your job ‘costs people real money.’

I was interviewed by Venessa Wong at MarketWatch about the latest polling on loving your job (spoiler alert: lots of people don’t!). She wrote, in part:

The concept that workers should love their job emerged as the U.S. shifted from having a largely industrial workforce to a heavily service- and knowledge-based workforce, Sarah Jaffe, author of “Work Won’t Love You Back,” told MarketWatch.

“You didn’t expect anybody to love standing on the automobile assembly line,” she said. But there was a notion that people could harbor a passion for other types of work, she added — and companies could exploit that passion.

….

Unsettled workers are realizing that what they want isn’t to love their job, but “a decent paycheck and some stability,” Jaffe said. In fact, 93% of workers told Glassdoor last month that they’ve stayed in a job they didn’t love because of the stability it provided. 

….

So-called job huggers, people who stay in their jobs, can also try to focus on projects that energize them, or ask to switch teams or managers to make their workdays better, according to Glassdoor’s report. 

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Monday briefing: The community solidarity driving the fightback against ICE in Minneapolis

I was interviewed by Aamna Mohdin at the Guardian for their Monday Briefing newsletter, about the organizing in Minneapolis to protect immigrant communities from Trump’s ICE/Border Patrol surge. She wrote, in part:

Nationally, pressure is mounting. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana has said the “credibility of ICE and DHS [Department of Homeland Security] are at stake”, while a prominent Republican candidate and attorney, Chris Madel, has withdrawn from Minnesota’s gubernatorial race. Recent polling shows a plurality of Americans now support abolishing ICE.

Jaffe describes the immigration raids as not only racist, but also part of a wider push to make America more white. Stephen Miller, a key White House senior adviser, denies this, and said questions about whether the administration’s tactics were racist were “dumb”.

A long read on Miller, viewed as the ideologue behind Trump’s immigration policies, quotes allies who say he wants to reverse America’s post-1960s immigration boom, taking in migrants from Nordic Europe, while severely restricting those from the global south, in a bid to reshape America’s ethnic and political landscape.

But, Jaffe adds, “what they’re actually doing right now is turning more white people that they assume are their base into Renee Goods and Alex Prettis.”

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‘The Bear’: When love for work is a scam at El Pais

Noelia Ramirez at El Pais used Work Won’t Love You Back (alongside Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot) to explore the themes of loving your work in the TV series The Bear. She writes (in Spanish):

Richie es el sujeto que mejor representa la privatización del estrés en la que vivimos inmersos: esa teoría neoliberal que nos ha hecho creer que si no tienes trabajo es porque no lo has hecho lo suficientemente duro (y sin cobrar, claro). La que nos adoctrina no solo en pensar en que deberíamos sentirnos naturalmente inclinados a quererlo. Es pensar que la libertad solo existe gracias a él. Es lo que te hace persona, lo que define quién eres. Lo que te ordena la vida. Como al bueno de Richie, quién no va a querer lo mejor para él y que todo le salga bien, en Tenedores.

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On Grief and Revolution: Q&A and event video at Deceleration

The lovely folks at Deceleration, a Texas-based independent news outlet, filmed my San Antonio event with the brilliant Alex Birnel, Ananda Tomas and Joleen Garcia. Alex also did a further interview with me for Deceleration’s site, and editor Greg Harman wrote this lovely editor’s note:

Entering 2025 with MAGA ascendant means a physical and psychic scramble as we prepare to protect those around us who are immediately vulnerable to long promised campaigns of state violence. It is increasingly clear that Trump 2.0 will also require surviving and fighting an ‘imperial’ presidency committed to redrawing international borders, historically a recipe for large-scale conflict. The emotional toll of this onslaught of threats, followed by the groveling of too many who could have provided a degree of buffer for the less resourced, has put “brace for impact” into regular journalistic usage. MAGA at home and abroad means the fracturing and crushing of undocumented families, of trans and queer people, a constant labeling and weeding out of a fabricated “enemy within” to justify the erosion of rights, and a raffling off to the highest bidder (entry price $1B) of the marvelous network of beings often sterilized as the “environment” as the Earth continues to boil and spark from fossil-fueled abuse. Deceleration offers this conversation, and many more to come, in the hopes that those working for justice will make heartfelt and thoughtful space for the needs of the broad-based inter-generational movement materializing now. It is a movement full of pain and humor. Of joy and terror. Of grief and all stages of grieving. Prepare room.

You can read the whole thing at Deceleration, and watch the video above.

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Why loving your job isn’t always a good thing and can be a trap at Elle Spain

Marita Alonso interviewed me about Work Won’t Love You Back for Elle Spain. She writes:

“You’re a freelancer, right?” We’re two minutes into our conversation and essayist Sarah Jaffe has already warned us from the way I talk about work that I don’t know what a payroll is. I confess to her straight away that I was not, am not, and will not be one of those people who claim to 
“love their job” above all else, and that’s precisely what she talks about in ‘‘Trabajar. Un amor no correspondido’’ (Capitán Swing, 2024), a book that examines why “doing what you like” is a recipe for exploitation that generates a new tyranny of work in which we happily accept tasks that take over our lives. We have grown up with the idea that work is not just a way to make a living; but a vocation that completes us and that we love. Jaffe assures us that this lie prevents us from seeing the cracks in the labor system and drives us to fall into formulas of exploitation and accept precarious working conditions in the hope that tomorrow, perhaps, things will change…

Read the whole thing at Elle Spain