by Sarah Jaffe
Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Jaffe
Cover design by Pete Garceau
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First Edition: January 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jaffe, Sarah, 1980–author.
Title: Work won’t love you back : how devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted, and alone / Sarah Jaffe.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Bold Type Books, [2021]| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031919 | ISBN 9781568589398 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781568589381 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Quality of work-life. | Job satisfaction.| Work-life balance.| Work—Psychological aspects. | Labor.
Classification: LCC HD6955 .J34 2021 | DDC 331.2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031919
ISBNs: 978-1-56858-939-8 (hardcover), 978-1-56858-938-1 (e-book)
E3-20201217-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction. Welcome to the Working Week
PART ONE: WHAT WE MIGHT CALL LOVE Chapter 1. Nuclear Fallout: The Family
Chapter 2. Just Like One of the Family: Domestic Work
Chapter 3. We Strike Because We Care: Teaching
Chapter 4. Service with a Smile: Retail
Chapter 5. Suffer for the Cause: Nonprofits
PART TWO: ENJOY WHAT YOU DO! Chapter 6. My Studio Is the World: Art
Chapter 7. Hoping for Work: Interns
Chapter 8. Proletarian Professionals: Academia
Chapter 9. Playbor of Love: Technology
Chapter 10. It’s All Fun and Games: Sports
Conclusion. What Is Love?
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Notes
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Praise for Work Won’t Love You Back
For Melissa and Peter
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INTRODUCTION
WELCOME TO THE WORKING WEEK
I LOVE MY WORK.
Technically, I don’t have a job. I haven’t had one in a few years, since I left the last magazine that hired me full-time for a one-year stint as a staff writer. Since then, I have supported myself as a freelance journalist, to varying degrees of success. I travel, I report, I give the occasional talk, and mostly, I write. I meet fascinating people and get to share their stories with the world, and I actually, at least at the moment, make a living at it.
I also make about $15,000 less a year than the average woman my age with my level of education.1
I am the poster child for work in today’s economy. I’m flexible, working on the fly from a laptop in coffee shops around the country and occasionally the world. I don’t have an employer that pays for my health insurance, and forget about retirement benefits. Vacation? What’s that? I have none of the things that used to signify a stable adult life—no family, no property, just me and a dog. (On the upside, I don’t have a boss, either.)
This book isn’t about me, though. It is about the millions of people around the world who share some or even most of my working conditions, even if they’ve managed to snag a good old-fashioned full-time job. So many features of what people used to consider “employment security” are gone, melted into air. Instead, as a thousand articles and nearly as many books have told us over and over, we’re all exhausted, burned out, overworked, underpaid, and have no work-life balance (or just no life).
At the same time, we’ve been told that work itself is supposed to bring us fulfillment, pleasure, meaning, even joy. We’re supposed to work for the love of it, and how dare we ask questions about the way our work is making other people rich while we struggle to pay rent and barely see our friends.
Like so many things about late capitalism, the admonishment of a thousand inspirational social media posts to “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” has become folk wisdom, its truthiness presumably everlasting—stretching back to our caveperson ancestors, who I suppose really enjoyed all that mammoth hunting or whatever. Instead of “never working,” the reality is that we work longer hours than ever, and we’re expected to be available even when technically off the clock. All this creates stress, anxiety, and loneliness. The labor of love, in short, is a con.2
But the expectation that we will love our jobs isn’t actually all that old. Once upon a time, it was assumed, to put it bluntly, that work sucked, and that people would avoid it if at all humanly possible. From the feudal system until about thirty or forty years ago, the ruling class tended to live off its wealth. The ancient Greeks had slaves and banausoi—a lower class of workers, including manual laborers, skilled artisans, and tradespeople—to do the work so that the upper classes could enjoy their leisure time and participate in community life. If you’ve ever read a Jane Austen novel and wondered how those people who don’t seem to do much of anything (except hem and haw about whom to marry) got by, you get the general picture. Work, to the wealthy, was for someone else to do.3
Since the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a shift. The ownership class these days does tend to work, and indeed, to make a fetish of its long hours. But the real change has come in the lives of those of us who don’t make millions. It’s become especially important that we believe that the work itself is something to love. If we recalled why we work in the first place—to pay the bills—we might wonder why we’re working so much for so little.4
People have long considered the question of whether work should be enjoyable. In the 1800s, socialist and artisan William Morris wrote of the three hopes that might make work worth doing—“hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself.” Morris acknowledged that the idea of pleasurable work might seem strange to most of his readers, but argued that the inequality that capitalism had wrought meant that some who did no work lived off the labor of others, who were condemned by this system to “useless toil.” Modern industry had taken away what little independence and power craftspeople might have had and reduced them to interchangeable, robotic wage laborers. No one cared whether the proletariat liked its work—it wasn’t given a choice in the matter.5
But those proletarians, too, usually tried their hardest to escape work. The labor movement’s earliest demands were usually for less work—shorter working hours, down to twelve, then eleven, then ten, then eight, plus days off. The strike, th
e 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. Capitalists would give up a little here and there to keep the profits flowing, but they also sought new strategies to keep workers on track beyond simple brute force.6
The carrot that was eventually offered to the industrial working class was what is often called the Fordist compromise, named, of course, after Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Company. Workers would give up a large chunk of their time, but a manageable one—generally five eight-hour days of work a week—to the boss and in return they would get a decent paycheck, health care (either provided by the company, in the United States, or, in other countries, provided by the state), and maybe some paid holidays and a pension to retire on. It was Morris’s “hope of rest”—and, if not actually the hope of controlling one’s product, at least some financial remuneration—that provided workers with some ability to support themselves, and maybe a family, and to enjoy themselves in their time off the shop floor.7
This might be hard for some of us to imagine, now, as we sneak in time to read between checking work emails or waiting on call for the next shift. And it’s certainly not something to romanticize—work was often both grinding and dull, and workers often too tired to enjoy their hard-won free time. But it allowed for a brief period of stability, from the end of the Great Depression until the 1960s, nostalgia for which still haunts us today.
Like most compromises, the Fordist bargain had left both sides vaguely unsatisfied, and it was held steady largely by repeated strikes from the workers on one side and repeated attempts by the bosses to unpick it on the other. But it was a deal that the ownership class had more or less gone along with when times were good and profits high enough that they didn’t mind the sharing too much. It was less appealing when crisis struck in the 1970s. “By the 1970s, the dynamism the system had displayed in the immediate postwar decades was exhausted, worn down by multiple political challenges and institutional sclerosis,” explained economist James Meadway. The solution to this problem, for capital, was to squeeze labor harder. Companies closed factories in high-wage countries and moved them to places where they could pay a fraction of the rates workers commanded in the United States or the United Kingdom. Working hours began to creep upward, and incomes down; more families relied on two incomes, and with two working parents, no one had time to do the housework.8
By 2016, the United States had hemorrhaged enough industrial jobs that Donald Trump made them a focus of his pitch to “Make America Great Again.” In 2017, after he became president, I went to Indianapolis to visit the Carrier plant. The factory, which had been slated to shut down in 2016, had been a campaign focal point for Trump’s promise to bring good jobs back. When he won, he returned to Carrier to declare “Mission Accomplished,” telling the workers that he’d cut a deal to keep their plant open. But when I arrived, the Rexnord plant around the corner was closing. Those workers didn’t get a visit from the president as their jobs disappeared; nor did the workers in Lordstown, Ohio, where the General Motors plant closed in March 2019.
The workers I spoke to in Indiana and Ohio all wanted to keep the plants open, but none of them waxed lyrical about their jobs. They hadn’t taken those positions to find fulfillment; they took them to find a paycheck. They took them for the weekends they’d have off, the homes they’d be able to buy. When I asked what they’d miss about their jobs, none of them said the work itself—they spoke of coworkers so close they’d become like family, of after-shift beers at the bar across the street, and of the solidarity that came from being active in their union (solidarity that brought them to the picket lines in GM’s 2019 strike even after the plant had been closed for months). But mostly, they spoke of money, of the reality that losing a $26-an-hour job (plus overtime) meant a serious downgrade in their standard of living.
Looming outside the Carrier plant were Amazon and Target distribution centers, the likely future of work for some of the folks let go from their union jobs. The distribution center or warehouse job has become synonymous with misery these days: stories abound of workers having to urinate into bottles because they’re not allowed enough restroom breaks, being tracked around the facility via GPS, or popping Advil like candy to deal with the aches and pains. Yet even Amazon, in denying the reports of hellish conditions written up by journalist Emily Guendelsberger, touts its “passionate employees, whose pride and commitment are what make the Amazon customer experience great.”9
The global pandemic in 2020 just made the brutality of the workplace more visible. The amount of people employed in manufacturing worldwide has shrunk, but still the work is done, and more and more of it for pennies and without union protections. Women and children labor in deadly conditions in factories in places like Bangladesh, where the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in 2013 killed 1,132 workers and injured more than 2,000 more. The day-to-day conditions of Bangladeshi garment workers—or, say, the workers who assemble iPhones at the Foxconn plant in China—range from tedious to backbreaking to deadly. Few seriously expect such workers to like their jobs, though they might face pressure to smile for the factory inspectors on the rare occasions they come around.10
Coal miners and factory workers have been described in many an article, laden with stereotypes, as Trump’s base, layering a thick sheen of romance over what was and remains miserable work. George Orwell famously described the coal mines of Wigan, outside Manchester, England, as “like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell.” GM workers at the Linden plant in New Jersey told sociologist Ruth Milkman that the place was “like prison”; at Lordstown, they called management “the little SS or the Gestapo.” Chuckie Denison, recently retired from Lordstown, told me “on the plant floor, there was basically a war on the workers.” Those jobs, Milkman explained, had been good because they had been union jobs, not because workers’ actual day-to-day experience was anything other than “relentless and dehumanizing.”11
That process of standardization and control was designed to reduce workers down to interchangeable cogs—so interchangeable that shutting down a factory in Indianapolis and opening it in Mexico or Bangladesh, where labor is cheaper, is easy. Or interchangeable enough to be replaced utterly by machines.
But the process of outsourcing or automating these jobs out of expensive locations like the United States and Western Europe has shifted the nature of work in those rich countries and resulted, strangely enough, in employers seeking out those very human traits that industrial capitalism had tried so hard to strip away. Those human traits—creativity, “people skills,” caring—are what employers seek to exploit in the jobs we’re supposed to love. Exercising them is what is supposed to make work less miserable, but instead it has helped work to worm its way deeper into every facet of our lives.12
The political project that brought us here is known as neoliberalism, though it sometimes goes by other names: post-Fordism, maybe, or just “late capitalism.” As political philosopher Asad Haider explained, “neoliberalism… is really two quite specific things: first, a state-driven process of social, political, and economic restructuring that emerged in response to the crisis of postwar capitalism, and second, an ideology of generating market relations through social engineering.” The success of the latter part of the project depended on twisting those desires for liberation articulated in the 1960s and 1970s, redefining “freedom” away from a positive concept (freedom to do things) and toward a negative one (freedom from interference). Neoliberalism encourages us to think that everything we want and need must be found with a price tag attached.13
Neoliberalism didn’t just happen; it was a set of choices made by the winning side in a series of struggles. The victors remade the state to subject everything to competition; to enforce private property rights; and to protect the right of individuals to accumulate. Public services were sold off to private profiteers. Citizens became customers. Freedom was t
here, the neoliberals argued, you just had to purchase it.14
Neoliberalism was born in Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratic socialist Salvador Allende and, with the advice of American economists, reorganized the economy by force. That year also brought oil shocks and a global downturn, a collapse in asset values, and the beginnings of a crisis for capitalism—unemployment and inflation were both rising, and social movements were demanding change. In that context, Pinochet cleared the way for neoliberalism with brutality and torture, despite the claims of “freedom.”15
Despite the violence at its heart, neoliberalism would spread from Chile with the support of democratically elected governments. Margaret Thatcher, who became prime minister in the United Kingdom in 1979, set out to crush unions and destroy the very idea of solidarity. She sold off public utilities and state-owned enterprises and turned public housing into private condos. To people who had little, Thatcherism offered the pleasures of cruelty, the negative solidarity of seeing others made even worse off than themselves by cuts to the welfare state. “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul,” Thatcher said.16
Thatcher is most famous, perhaps, for her declaration that “there is no alternative.” She meant it as a preference—communism was still kicking at the time, and social democracy still had a grip on much of Europe. But TINA was the foundation of the phenomenon the British theorist Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”—the idea that it is impossible to imagine any other way that the world could be organized. Neoliberalism relies on such realism, even when—or perhaps especially when—it is faltering.17
In the United States, Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s “shock” in 1980, limiting the money supply and hiking interest rates, put tens of thousands of companies out of business. Cities like Youngstown, Ohio, saw more than one in five people out of work. Thatcher’s buddy Ronald Reagan won office that year and followed her path, slashing tax rates and breaking the air-traffic controllers’ union. The economic and political crisis of the 1970s had begun the process of deindustrialization, and Thatcher, Volcker, and Reagan stepped on the accelerator. Production was shut down in the rich countries and shipped elsewhere or automated. Autoworkers, used to calling strikes to halt production to make demands, were suddenly put in the position of calling for plants to be kept open. Joshua Clover, in his book Riot, Strike, Riot, called this “the affirmation trap”: a situation where “labor is locked into the position of affirming its own exploitation under the guise of survival.” It is a short step from the affirmation trap to the labor of love.18