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Work Won’t Love Us Back at The Forge

I chatted with Lena Eckert-Erdheim at The Forge to talk about what inspired her new book, the work of organizing, and the urgency of transforming the way that we think and feel about work. An excerpt:

There’s a difference between the dignity of work and the dignity of workers.

Right. Exactly. And also, there are a lot of people who can’t work. There are a lot of people who are unemployed right now because half of capitalism is shut down. There are a lot of people who have disabilities, who are ill, who are old, who are retired, who are children, who cannot, should not, do not need to work and are also still dignified human beings. This idea that you’re only worth something if you work, we’ve seen where that gets us. It gets us the lieutenant governor of Texas saying grandma would be happy to die to keep capitalism going. It gets us denying prisoners COVID vaccines because they’re not productive citizens. It leads to people justifying people dying of COVID because they already had a disability or an illness. I don’t think fetishizing work gets us anywhere good, and that’s stuff that I’ve learned from disability rights movements, elder’s rights movements, and prison abolitionists.

Read the rest at The Forge.
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Work is Unrequited Love at VD

Continuing my virtual trip around the world, I spoke to Davide Schiavon at Italian magazine VD about Work Won’t Love You Back:

“Do what you like: A mentality that is told very well by Sarah Jaffe, American journalist, in her book Work will not love you back ( The work does not reciprocate your love ), released in January for The Bold Type , American publisher of the Hachette group. The book, not yet translated into Italian, was highly appreciated in the United States. Sarah Jaffe scours the world of work going to the heart of every profession, recounting its hypocrisies through long reportages. There are ten focuses, intense interviews with workers: from the unpaid intern to the teacher on the verge of a nervous breakdown, from the employee of a non-profit to the Amazon warehouse worker, up to the professional athlete. The tyranny of work clearly emerges, leaving no space and time for anything. “How devotion to our works has made us exploited, exhausted and alone” is the emblematic subtitle of the book.

Read the whole thing at VD
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Love and Labour at Not9to5

Elinor Potts interviewed me about Work Won’t Love You Back for Not9to5. She writes:

With the boundaries of work and life increasingly muddled as we work from home through the pandemic, many of us have found ourselves increasingly committed to working as a distraction. As Autonomy reported in their ‘blueprint for the new normal’ report, which we blogged about back in January, 80% of overtime carried out from home goes unpaid, compared to 60% of office work, and during the pandemic, the average workday increased by 8.2% – nearly 50 minutes.  

Exploring the root of our compulsion to work and the realities of emotionally demanding labour, Elinor chatted with Journalist and Author Sarah Jaffe following the recent publication of her new book, Work Won’t Love You Back

Read the whole thing at Not9to5
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“There is no such thing as the ‘dignity of work’” at The New Statesman

I spoke with the excellent George Eaton at The New Statesman about Work Won’t Love You Back, punk rock, shitty jobs, dignity and where it comes from, and how hope, as Mariame Kaba says, is a discipline. He writes:

“We get tripped up with this idea of the ‘dignity of work’,” Jaffe told me. “The miners don’t have dignity because they’re miners, they have dignity because they’re human… If you tell people that the only thing that gives them dignity is their work, well, when we have millions of people applying for benefits what the hell have we just done to those people if we tell them their only worth is working?”

Jaffe, who describes herself with justification as a “labour journo before it was cool”, said that she was politicised by “punk rock and shitty jobs”. She spoke of the influence of her late Jewish father, who owned restaurants and a bicycle shop (“he was very clear that no one would hire him”) and quipped: “Who wants to have a boss anyway?”

“He didn’t quite accept that I was going to take that politically in the direction that I did,” Jaffe reflected. “I’m trying to abolish everyone’s boss.”

Read the whole thing at The New Statesman
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Do You Enjoy What You Do? at Dissent

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

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Love (for work) will tear us apart at AJ Plus

Sarah Leonard interviewed me about Work Won’t Love You Back for AJ+’s newsletter, subtext. She writes:

Sarah Jaffe (@sarahljaffe) is a writer and journalist who chronicles social movements: how they rise and fall, and the social relationships that underlie them. Few have done as much to chronicle the rise of the left and of a new generation of labor organizing over the last decade.

Jaffe has long cast a critical eye on the way we talk about work. Her most recent bookWork Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, is a work of reporting and ideas in the tradition of journalist-analysts like Barbara Ehrenreich. I talked to Jaffe on a Friday afternoon, when, it’s fair to say, we were both a little exhausted with work. 

Read the whole thing (and subscribe!) at subtext.
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Suffering for the Cause: an interview on Work Won’t Love You Back at ReproJobs

The good folks at Reprojobs, an outlet for workers in the reproductive health movement, interviewed me about Work Won’t Love You Back and particularly about my nonprofits chapter, which tells the story of a worker who was part of the union drive at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. They write:

YOUR BOOK EXPLORES THE HISTORY OF THE EXPLOITATION OF WORKERS, ORGANIZED LABOR, AND THEIR INTERSECTION WITH RACISM, CLASSISM, SEXISM, AND XENOPHOBIA. WE KNOW THAT SO MANY OF THE ISSUES IMPACTING REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM STEM FROM THESE OPPRESSIONS, AS WELL AS LABOR INEQUITY, BUT SO FEW WORKERS IN REPRO SEE THEMSELVES AS PART OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT OR LABOR ORGANIZING FOR THEMSELVES. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS? IN THE BOOK, YOU EXPLAIN THE HISTORY OF NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS BEGINNING AS CHARITY WORK DONE BY WEALTHY NON-WAGE EARNING WHITE WOMEN AS A HOBBY AND THEN DESCRIBE ITS TRANSFORMATION INTO THE TAX HAVENS FOR CORPORATIONS AND CAPITALISTS WE SEE TODAY, ALSO KNOWN AS THE ‘NONPROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.’ THE REALITY IS THAT MANY OF OUR ORGANIZATIONS’ BOARDS AND FUNDING SOURCES ARE STILL DIRECTED BY PHILANTHROPISTS WHO ARE REMOVED FROM THE LIVED EXPERIENCES OF THE PEOPLE WE SERVE, OUR OWN EXPERIENCES AS WORKERS, AND UPHOLD THE RACIST AND CLASSIST SYSTEM CREATING THIS WHOLE MESS.

Read the whole thing at ReproJobs
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The Myth of “Loving What You Do” Has Ruined Modern Work for Everyone at Fatherly

I spoke with Lizzy Francis at Fatherly about Work Won’t Love You Back, care work, parenting, and collective action. She writes:

“Love what you do, you will never work a day in your life.” Or so the old adage goes. That phrase has been pummeled into our heads — and is even the slogan for a popular co-working space, printed on t-shirts and hats, an ethos in and of itself. For most people, that phrase is a load of crap, and it’s a harmful load of crap, too. After all, as long as people wonder how to find a job you love, they’ll never actually step in to make the job that they have a better one. “Do what you love, love what you do” is a fantasy of modern work that keeps people from understanding the ways in which they could make work better for themselves and their coworkers.

After all, the implication that “loving what you do” carries is that if you find something that stokes your passion, then frustration anger, or the rat-race struggle to get that promotion won’t actually feel like, well, work. It also has the pernicious effect of making money and benefits secondary to that passion — rather than the benefit of work itself. This type of thinking, however, pervades the modern workplace. And it’s making work worse than ever. 

“Work is awful,” says Sarah Jaffe, labor reporter and author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Work was awful before the pandemic, and the pandemic has just made work even worse.”

In her new book, Jaffe traces the death of typical factory jobs and the rise of care work (from service industry jobs, which account for the majority of work, to health care work) and emotional labor to the rising attitude that employees should love what they do to make their livings. Jaffe says that emotional labor is the hallmark of most middle-class jobs — whether you work in an office or as a nurse.

While that’s perfectly fine, it has led to an expectation that everyone is passionate about their 9-5’s. This false notion makes it seem like the job — not the salary, not the benefits, not the ability to stay home with your kids — is the reward in and of itself. When the work becomes the reward, everyone gets screwed. We overwork, we get underpaid, and worst of all, we don’t see a way out. Parents, especially, are caught under the wheel that keeps turning.

Read the whole thing at Fatherly

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Prison strikers building a movement for justice and decarceration, with Janos Marton

The nationwide prison strike that began August 21 is ongoing, and it comes at a moment when Americans are perhaps primed to hear demands from prisoners and consider them in a new way. Protests and uprisings in recent years have called attention to the rampant inequality perpetuated by prisons, jails, arrests, and prosecutions, and as prisoners coordinate with each other to resist their conditions on the inside, Janos Marton of the ACLU’s Smart Justice program joins me to talk about what people on the outside can do to support the strike and the demands of the prisoners.

 

People have been asking me what they can tangibly do. The organizers made clear in the lead-up to this strike that they weren’t expecting people on the outside to be able to do a whole lot to actually support the strike as it is happening because it is something that is facility specific and driven by and organized on the inside.
But they made a few exceptions. One is to the extent that there are protests being held outside of facilities, they said that it not only gives them energy and hope when they see people protesting in solidarity outside of their own facilities, but it also generally causes Corrections to think twice before retaliating, which is a major concern we had as an organization in the lead-up to the strike–that the organizers of the strike are going to be retaliated against either during or after the strike is over. The people can participate in local actions, that makes a big difference.
There is a Twitter account @IWW_IWOC which has been posting updates from the strike and occasional calls to action, usually around this issue saying something like, “Call such and such facility to make it clear to them not to retaliate against people participating in the prison strike.” Just continuing to amplify these messages.
I think the idea that there is a prison strike and what the demands of the prison strike are are still not well understood to the broader public. So, the more people who are aware of these issues can do to amplify the ten demands and the fact that the strike is happening, then that is helpful, too.
On a final note, when people read through the ten demands they may be surprised to see how many of them they already knew about and agreed with. Even though this is a radical act to strike in a prison setting and that is why we have to show such solidarity to these brave men and women, at the end of the day what they are asking for is very much in line with what people have been demanding for a very long time outside of prison walls, as well: an end to racist policing, investing in rehabilitation in the system rather than punishment, reducing the length of sentences, and ultimately this right to vote, this right to participate in democracy for all people.

Up at Truthout
Up at The Progressive

Interviews for Resistance is a syndicated series of interviews with organizers, agitators and troublemakers, available twice weekly as text and podcast. You can now subscribe on iTunes! Previous interviews here

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A new agenda for labor law, with Celine McNicholas


Labor law in the US has been broken down over the past several decades until it’s nearly nonexistent. And yet a new wave of worker resistance and political interest in labor makes it a good time to push for a reimagining and rebuilding of the laws that govern the workplace. The Economic Policy Institute has just published a new agenda for doing just that–rebuilding the right to a union, giving unions real power again, and protecting workers who don’t have unions for what the institute calls “First Day Fairness.” Celine McNicholas, one of the authors of the report, joins me to talk about the movement that will be necessary to rewrite the rules to give workers an equal chance.

I think it is really encouraging that so many of these reforms already live in existing, already-introduced legislation in Congress. None of them get a great deal of attention, but in particular the Workers’ Freedom to Negotiate Act which was introduced this Congress which goes to the heart of many of the reforms aimed at ensuring that folks can unionize. That is the piece of legislation that includes some of the re-imagined right to strike reforms, as well. In terms of how likely it is that any of this passes, I think that is really on all of us. We have a responsibility as advocates to get in there and make sure that people are, number one, aware of these bills, and also that there is a grassroots movement. I think mentioning that you are in Wisconsin, there is a great demonstration in what workers can demand from elected officials. We absolutely have to greet this new Congress with the clear understanding, if it is Democratic controlled, that these issues are top-tier issues, that we demand that they be considered in the first hundred days. The fact that we haven’t had a minimum wage increase in so long at this point, we are looking at over a decade of failure to pass legislation, that is shared by both parties. I think in terms of the likelihood of all of these measures, any of these measures, passing is really incumbent upon all of us to speak up and demand that our elected officials don’t just treat these things as campaign slogans, but that we really demand action on these critical reforms that, quite frankly, affect all of us regardless of party affiliation, regardless of many of the other issues that may divide us. I think a fair economy and how we are all treated at work, how we are all paid, and economic justice, to me, is such a unifying issue that I really hold out hope that it will be a top-tier issue in a Democratic controlled Congress. Let Trump veto a minimum wage increase. Let Trump veto a bill that would actually give people in this country a meaningful path to have a union in their workplace. I remain optimistic that Democrats will recognize that these issues simply cannot be ignored going forward. That said, we have to demand it. It is not enough to just be against the status quo. We really need meaningful reform in this area.

Up at Truthout.
Up at The Progressive
Interviews for Resistance is a syndicated series of interviews with organizers, agitators and troublemakers, available twice weekly as text and podcast. You can now subscribe on iTunes! Previous interviews here