Jonathan Malesic reviewed Work Won’t Love You Back at The New Republic and it’s just lovely. I want to excerpt the whole thing here but I will not! Instead, here’s a snippet:
Both care and creativity supposedly stand outside the capitalist drive to extract profit from labor. That’s why the labor-of-love myth is so effective in aiding it. Convince people that they are doing something they love, and how can they demand better working conditions? A former Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains employee tells Jaffe that the organization fought a fledgling union by claiming that management and labor were all “family.” And who would threaten to strike against family? Whereas other writers, confronting this rhetoric, have urged us to stop loving our jobs, Jaffe shows how workers can turn the love of work into a tool they can leverage against their bosses.
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The love ethos, then, is a double-edged sword. As Marx and Engels claimed in The Communist Manifesto, the very skills that make someone a productive employee also make them a formidable opponent of management. When Woolworth’s employees struck in 1937 in Detroit, Jaffe writes, the saleswomen “knew that the same charm that had gotten them hired in the first place would play well with reporters, and they performed for the cameras that turned up as well as for one another.” This is true, too, for the professional-managerial class, highly educated workers who have lost considerable autonomy and security since the 1970s. This proletarianization of large numbers of professionals, Jaffe observes, “makes them dangerous even as it strips away their power.”
Read the whole thing at The New Republic