Work Won't Love You

Sarah Jaffe and the cover of her new book

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 book, Work 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.

How did you start writing about the ideology of work and how work feels?

I remember reading people like Ellen Willis when I was in my early twenties, and writing a lot about pop culture. Ellen Willis was the first and best pop culture critic, and wrote about the politics of everything, and about feminism. A lot of the way I think about doing journalism probably goes back to her.

I was waiting tables and also trying to do journalism and getting paid very little for the journalism, and working three jobs, four jobs. So I went to journalism school, and the economy collapsed while I was there. After that, it was necessary to figure out how to write about the economy in a different way. At the time, the progressive internet was centered around the Iraq War and foreign policy, and not that much about what was actually going on in people's day-to-day lives.

And of course, most of what goes on in people's day-to-day lives is work.

It seems to me there’s a deep feminist analysis guiding this book.

You can't think work without thinking gender, even if that gender mostly goes unremarked upon – because many people think of white men. Most of us who move through the world of work are marked in a variety of ways by gender and race and ability and immigration status and any number of other things.

I was pleased to have Kathi Weeks host one of my book events, which was just the greatest thing. I remember having my mind blown by The Problem With Work. I had been writing about work with this deeply embedded assumption about the dignity of work, as well as the second-wave feminist assumption that I was raised with, that my goal in life should be to have a successful career. Kathi Weeks just drops this bomb in our laps right: Oh, actually, maybe work's bad. And maybe our goal should be to get rid of it as much as possible.

This is clearly at odds with the idea that we should love our jobs and do what we love.

The argument that I make is that it's not a victory for workers to be required to have more emotional attachment – that's actually just work demanding more of us. It’s not just that your body has to show up to a place for X amount of time, but now your heart has to be involved too.

Some people have called enthusiasm for work “self-exploitation.” But you cannot exploit yourself. The point of exploitation is that somebody else is profiting off of your labor by not paying you as much as your labor is worth to them. You can, however, self-motivate in ways that actually produce a lot more value for your boss that do not accumulate back to you in any meaningful way.

Historically, the labor movement was always fighting for less working time without a loss in pay. And that demand has faded.

What about artists or people doing creative work? Or teachers, many of whom say they really appreciate parts of their jobs?

The second half of the book is about creative work and the narrative of the artist as the sort of special, magical, unique genius, who is so motivated to do their thing that it's not really work at all. And therefore, any payment that you get for your art is just extra.

That narrative has infected all of these other kinds of work from academia to computer programming, right? We wouldn't necessarily think of computer programmers as artists, but the same narrative is applied to them: geniuses who are uniquely talented and special (and men) and will devote hours and hours and hours of extra time on the job.

Even the jobs where you would expect to just show up, do the job, and go home are like this now. I drove by a billboard the other day for Amazon warehouse jobs, and it's got this picture of the smiling woman on it, holding a package and it says “get a job delivering smiles.” And I wanted to shoot it with a paintball gun. The idea that working in an Amazon warehouse is anything other than miserable, grinding work that is exhausting and painful! But you're delivering the smile. So it's cool.

A lot of teachers really do love the kids and love teaching. But I want to defend that right to say this is a job. I don't have to love it. The actual interaction with kids is usually the thing that people do find pleasurable, but there are a lot of other parts of the job that suck.

So is it bad for people to do what they love?

Alienation is not about your feelings. It's about your relation to capital. It's about your relation to the product of your labor. Do you control the conditions of your labor? No. Then you're still alienated labor, whether or not you like it.

I like my job some days, I hate my job some days. You know, some days writing is fun. Sometimes writing is a slog. All of that is fine, but what I actually need is a relationship with work that I have more control over. It’s a question about power, not about my feelings.

How can we create a different relationship to work? Your book is largely about organizing.

The kind of love that I'm trying to get at in my concluding chapter is not about romance or the family, but is actually about solidarity. I think it was Melissa [Gira Grant] in our book who said that solidarity is power plus love directed. And I still think that's as good a definition as I've ever heard.

You don't have to love everybody that you stand with on the picket line, but you show up anyway. I think of the four days of just absolute torrential rain in Los Angeles during the teacher strike – four days straight of rain in Los Angeles doesn't happen but it happened for the first four days of the strike. All of the teachers were borrowing rain gear and it [was] miserable. But you show up because of the old labor movement adage: An injury to one is an injury to all. And that is an expression of love.