I sat down like an actual human for a real life chat with Natasha Lewis from Dissent to talk about Work Won’t Love You Back (outdoors, in the cold but still worth it) and you can read the interview now. She writes:
Natasha Lewis: You’re a labor journalist, so you spend a lot of time covering labor struggles, but a lot of the people you write about in this book don’t have unions. Could you tell me a bit about that choice?
Sarah Jaffe: In some of these cases it’s people who can’t have unions, right? I start out with a mom. The artists that I talk about are trying to form an artists’ union, but there isn’t really one for them to be part of. So, in those cases, that’s the story: how do you organize when you are aren’t really recognized as needing or deserving a union?
In other cases, they’re in organizations like United for Respect and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, where they’re organizing as workers, but they’re not proper union members. Others are founding members of new unions like the game workers, or the hockey players who are forming their worker organization.
This is what the workforce looks like now: a whole bunch of people who don’t have access to traditional unions, don’t have access to organizing help, and don’t have traditional-looking workplaces.
Read the whole thing at Dissent