News

Praxis Makes Perfect at Chompsky Blog

I spoke with the Chompsky: Power and Pop Culture blog about organizing, the media, and my career path. Read an excerpt:

Each interview will focus on praxis: action that allows you to put into practice whatever the interviewee’s work centers around – today’s is: Organising.

This week I talked to Sarah Jaffe, an American reporter and author who writes about labo(u)r issues. She is currently, alongside numerous other excellent freelance journalists, a Type Media Fellow meaning that her work is so good, that a nonprofit pays her specifically to do that and only that. And if you read enough Chompsky or know anything about the current state of jobs in journalism, you’ll know how special that is.

I’m particularly interested in her work because she tells human stories about work and organising, from history and today, with humour, illuminating in an accessible way the hidden mechanisms of exactly how the workplace works.

Read the rest at Chompsky
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A job you love at Il Tascabile

Another Italian interview! And a good moment to tell you that Work Won’t Love You Back will be translated into Italian and published in Italy by Minimum Fax. More details when I have them! But in the meantime, I spoke with Irene Doda for Il Tascabile and you can read it in Italian or click the little translate button and read in English too. An excerpt:

Precisely this “work of love” is the theme of the essay by American journalist Sarah Jaffe entitled Work Won’t Love You Back – which can be translated as “The work does not return your love”, forthcoming by minimum fax. Jaffe follows the story of the labor of love starting with those typically female tasks in the Fordist economic framework: domestic work and care work. But from the feminized nursing professions such as babysitting, to the role of teachers, to third sector and art professionals, Jaffe reconstructs the role of love and dedication in the neoliberal economy, to arrive at defining emotions as an everlasting sphere. more present and decisive in wage labor. The “work of love” makes workers potentially blackmailable, precisely by virtue of the devotion to their profession. We discussed with Sarah Jaffe about various themes that cross her essay, to reflect on how to frame the phenomenon of the labor of love in the contemporary world. 

Read the whole thing at Il Tascabile
News

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

News

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 Life and Death of the Dream Job at The Baffler

The wonderful Raechel Anne Jolie (whose book, Rust Belt Femme, I devoured in nearly one sitting) has written about Work Won’t Love You Back for The Baffler and I couldn’t be more thrilled. She writes:

The book contains original reporting interwoven with keen analysis of and remarkably thorough histories behind several different, but related, kinds of labor, including domestic care work (both hired and familial), public school teaching, non-profit staffing, academia, art, sports, and tech. Jaffe talks with people who were initially drawn to their jobs because they felt a genuine commitment to, or derived pleasure or purpose from, the work. Throughout these interviews, we bear witness to the complicated emotional stress of feeling passionate about work that is simultaneously exploitative and alienating.

This contradiction, Jaffe explains, although increasingly common, is a relatively new one. We haven’t always tried to find meaning in paid labor, and in fact a central struggle of the early labor movement was to reduce the number of hours we spent on the job. “The labor movement’s earliest demands were usually for less work . . . ” Jaffe reminds us. “The strike, the workers’ best weapon, is, after all, a refusal of work, and for a while they wielded it effectively, winning some concessions on the length of the working day and week as well as on wages.”

As a working-poor Boomer, my mom wasn’t conditioned to seek love in work. She had (and still has) a love for reading, craft-making, and family. She never had a passion for serving drinks at the Brown Derby, delivering newspapers at 3 a.m., serving cafeteria food, hauling ink cartridges in a print shop, or working for below minimum wage to do home health care. But I am from the post-Reagan generation, in which, Jaffe says, “it’s become especially important that we believe that the work itself is something to love.” When in 2003 I made it to college—with the help of above-the-poverty-line relatives, good grades, and a contract signing me up for decades of debt—I felt certain that it was a guaranteed path to escaping the menial labor I both performed and witnessed growing up. Even my burgeoning post-9/11 radical politics didn’t stop me from buying into the dominant narrative that college secured upward mobility. I think I needed to buy it—the idea that college wouldn’t be my ticket to “fulfilling work” was too much to bear. And so I did what I was told to do by posters in guidance counselor offices and bumper stickers on cars: “Follow your bliss”; “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”; and other messages that promised me my fate wouldn’t be the same as others from my blue-collar town.

Read the whole thing (it’s so good!) at The Baffler.