Category: Work Won’t Love You Back

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!

Amazon selected Work Won’t Love You Back as a “Best business and leadership book of 2021.” I feel weird about it, but I’ll take it!

Refinery29 puts Work Won’t Love You Back on its holiday gift list:

In the age of working from home or living at work, this eye-opener is all about empowering us to work less and help us figure out what actually gives us joy and satisfaction in our day-to-day lives.

Check it out.

Airelle Perrouin reviewed Work Won’t Love You Back alongside Amelia Horgan’s excellent Lost in Work for Tribune magazine. She writes:

People everywhere are challenging the narratives that characterise work as a route out of poverty, or to self-actualisation, because for most, neither holds true: in modern Britain, hard work simply does not guarantee a life of dignity, or safety, or fulfilment. A widely circulated meme captures a shift in attitudes, particularly among the young: ‘Darling I don’t have a dream job, I don’t dream of labour.’ In the current context, this can be read as an indictment of the myths of work as much as work itself: we might dream more of labour, for example, had that dreaming not been made into an act of labour itself – or were the current conditions of labour not so bleak. But how long will this shift last – and how far will it go?

Any solution to existing problems must be on a much larger, more radical scale than anything previously imagined. While Work Won’t Love You Back and Lost in Work provide accessible histories of capitalism and deconstruct the mythos of modern work, they ultimately remain focused on the future: Jaffe and Horgan never lose sight of who and what they’re fighting for – and despite plenty of righteous anger, both books are, ultimately, beacons of hope. As Horgan puts it, ‘We can’t get our lives back without radically changing the very foundation of society.’

Read the whole thing at Tribune

Alex Gallo-Brown at Yes Magazine reviewed Work Won’t Love You Back! An excerpt:

 I don’t quite remember when the relationship between us began to change. It might have been when I showed up to work one gray morning and there were hardly any customers at all. Rather than pay me my hourly wage of $7.75 to stand behind an empty counter, he told me to “bop around for a little while” and come back when there were more customers. When I received a paycheck that paid me for several hours less than the hours I had actually worked, he explained, “You weren’t working hard enough.” Another time, he quoted me one hourly wage but paid me a lesser rate. These are classic examples of wage theft, but at the time the only thing I understood was that if I wanted to keep working in the pizza booth, I had to play by his rules. 

I worked that job for another five summers. In some strange way, I loved working in the pizza booth. But the pizza booth (to riff on the title of labor journalist Sarah Jaffe’s new book) did not love me back. My boss was not my friend, and he certainly wasn’t my family. He was merely a person who held power over me, and his primary allegiance was to his bottom line. As I moved on to other food service jobs—alongside stints as a caregiver for people with disabilities, political canvasser, adjunct community college instructor, and nonprofit administrator, among many other gigs—it was a lesson that I would learn again and again. Work was a way to make one’s living, pointedly not a place to find happiness or develop one’s sense of identity, although it could sometimes be fun or even rewarding.

Read the rest at Yes Magazine