News

“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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Work Is Just Not That Into You at the Saturday Evening Post

I spoke to Nicholas Gilmore at the Saturday Evening Post about Work Won’t Love You Back, class composition, what we might do with our free time, and, it turns out, a lot about Bette Davis. He wrote:

“The thing about common sense is that it’s often wrong,” Sarah Jaffe writes in her recent book Work Won’t Love You Back. In the book — part labor history, part collection of profiles of workers — Jaffe takes aim at some entrenched American ideas about the daily grind.

Many of us were raised to aspire to turn our passion into a paycheck, but Jaffe writes that the whole notion of work as something we enjoy spending our time doing is rather new. Even if there is joy in the work, she says that this can often blur the line between labor and love in a way that rarely benefits workers.

Tracing the ways we work — and who gets compensated for it — from pre-industrial times to today’s video game designers and striking teachers, Jaffe makes a case for a renewed telling of an old story of labor, and perhaps a revival of an old strategy to solve our collective work woes.

Read the whole thing at the Saturday Evening Post.
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Freedom and leisure for everyone at Die Zeit

Lukas Hermsmeier wrote a long, thoughtful piece about Work Won’t Love You Back alongside Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work and Eva von Redecker’s Revolution for Life. In German, but also available in English! He writes:

What makes Jaffe’s analysis so interesting is that it merges the swelling mantra of love your work with the increasing fragmentation and precariousness of the world of work. Jaffe explains that the pressure to love one’s work, to even feel realized through it, is, to the extent that it is today, a phenomenon of the post-industrial age. Even long before that, as Max Weber pointed out at the beginning of the 20th century , the capitalist world of work had been shaped by Protestant ethics; and in the Fordist economy, too, the workers had been battered and the roles were unjustly distributed according to gender. It was only neoliberalism, however, writes Jaffe, “that tried to give us not freedom from work, but through work.”

Read the whole thing at Die Zeit
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What’s Love Got to Do With It? On Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back at Unemployed Negativity

Jason Read at Unemployed Negativity wrote a lovely post about Work Won’t Love You Back. It’s really good–I encourage you to read the whole thing. He writes:

There is a dialectic of sorts between bullshit jobs and hope labor. The more the general labor situation seems plagued by demanding and demeaning jobs the more people are driven to find something with passion and purpose. This is an escape from work on the terrain of work itself, an escape from the cubicle to the coffeeshop or, worse yet, the corporate co-working space. On the opposite side of this dialectic, those stuck in jobs that are not perceived as difficult or demanding have no sympathy for those who work doing something perceived as fun, rewarding, or meaningful. Case in point the hostility shown towards teachers. As Jaffe has said in an interview, unless you are a coal miner there is supposedly no reason for forming a union. This conflict  undermines any solidarity across the affective divide. I imagine a book on the difficulties of teachers, artists, and athletes will be met with derision by many–“what do they have to complain about?” or “If they wanted more money they should have gone into a more lucrative career.” For this reason alone Jaffe should be celebrated for writing this book. It is hard enough to criticize work in our society, hardy still when it is a matter of criticizing jobs that people love.

Read the whole thing.
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Keeping It in the Family: On Sarah Jaffe’s “Work Won’t Love You Back” at LA Review of Books

Maggie Levantovskaya reviewed Work Won’t Love You Back at the Los Angeles Review of Books and it’s so lovely, I’m crying over here.

She writes:

While the rhetoric of work-as-love generally operates against workers, it can also be strategically reclaimed for organizing purposes, as can be seen in her case study of public school teachers. As Jaffe explains, they’re “the ultimate laborers of love.” They’re also less likely to switch careers for better compensation, which only fuels the narrative that sacrifice is a necessary part of teaching and that discussions of material needs only sully the profession. When it comes to public conversations about teaching and pay, the either/or fallacy is strong, under the auspices that teachers are either “in it for the money” or for the love of the students. This ethos is perhaps best embodied in a now notorious meme: “Teachers don’t teach for the income. Teachers teach for the outcome.” Jaffe, whose focus on struggle is always about both hardship and resistance, dedicates ample space to demonstrating that, starting with the 2012 Chicago teacher strikes, unions flipped the narrative by appealing to teachers’ ties to local communities and their roles as caretakers. When unions used the slogan “Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions” in strikes across the US, they suggested that taking material care of teachers was indispensable to educating and caring for students. When in 2019, the Los Angeles teachers’ strike resulted in a new contract, they got the district to not only give them a six percent raise but also to “lower class sizes, put a nurse in every school, reduce standardized testing by 50 percent, hire more counselors, invest in more green space on campus, [and] cut back on random searches.” It’s difficult to imagine such a victory without both the power of collective bargaining and the sway of teachers’ image as laborers of love.

Read the whole thing at LARB
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Why Work Doesn’t Work, at PopMatters

Airelle Perrouin reviewed Work Won’t Love You Back for PopMatters! She writes:

This could have been essential reading at any time in the last 40 years, but released in January 2021,at the start of a year filled with economic and pandemic fear and uncertainty, Work Won’t Love You Back offers an important, timely reminder of the meaning of work. Jaffe highlights the critical connection between the terms we use to describe work, and the conditions we are willing to accept for ourselves and others. The crisis surrounding the people who work for companies like Amazon and Target is only one of the latest manifestations of the humanitarian failures of late capitalism. In another example of the dangers of capitalist exploitation, Jaffe refers to the tragic accident at Rana Plaza, a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed 1,132 people, and injured 2,500 more, when it collapsed in 2013.

Read the whole thing at PopMatters