Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  The jobs that replaced the factory jobs were in retail, in health care, and in services and technology. We hear a lot about the knowledge economy, about the exciting creative work we could be doing, but we’re all far more likely to be in some sort of service job. These jobs come with their own affirmation trap: you must show up with a smile on your face or be tossed out.19

  The ideals of freedom and choice that neoliberalism claims to embrace function, paradoxically, as a mechanism for justifying inequality. The choice is yours, but so are the costs for choosing wrong. Cuts to the welfare state mean that those costs can be deadly. This kind of freedom, as political theorist Adam Kotsko wrote, is also a trap, an “apparatus for generating blameworthiness.”20

  This dynamic is always individualizing—your situation in life must be the result of choices that you made, and thus no one else has any reason to sympathize, let alone to help, if you fall. Privatization, as Fisher noted, has brought with it the privatization of stress, the proliferation of depression, and a rise in anxiety. If you cannot get a job, it must be because you failed to do enough (unpaid) work to acquire the correct skills; if you get that job and it makes you miserable, just get another! Such discourse justifies the constant job-hopping that provides companies with what they want: just-in-time labor, easily hired and fired, easily controlled.21

  There’s another famous Thatcherism for this process, usually paraphrased as “There is no such thing as society,” though what she actually said was: “… who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.” Without a society, with the lines between the family and the workplace blurring, with little time for a personal life anyway, we are even more likely to try to make work more pleasurable, even to seek in it a replacement for the love we lack elsewhere. Over and over again while reporting this book, I spoke to workers who told me that their bosses described the workplace as “like a family.” One video-game company even brands itself a “fampany.” If we fail to love our work, it becomes another form of individual shame. Love, after all, is supposed to be an unlimited resource that lives within us: If the workplace is a family, shouldn’t we naturally love it?22

  Turning our love away from other people and onto the workplace serves to undermine solidarity. Thatcher’s statement that there was no such thing as society came after she had crushed labor unions, those vehicles not just of shop-floor action but off-the-clock sociality. If workers have a one-on-one love relationship with the job, then the solution for its failure to love you back is to move on or to try harder. It is not to organize with your coworkers to demand better. Collective action is unthinkable; the only answer is to work harder on yourself or to leave.23

  Yet the coercion behind the mask of love is becoming more visible these days, and workers are beginning to act again. The popularity of the concept of “burnout”—for what is burnout but the feeling experienced when one’s labor of love is anything but—reminds us of this. Repeated cycles of layoffs, steady low wages, and cutbacks to the private sector have made jobs harder and harder to love. The conditions under which “essential” workers had to report to the job during the coronavirus pandemic revealed the coercion at the heart of the labor relation. We are being punished for all the choices we have made even as we have continued to do what we are told—racking up student debt, working longer hours, answering work emails on our phones from parties, funerals, and bed, and doing more, always, with less.24

  Neoliberalism relies on the labor of love ideology to cover up the coercion that was in fact required to push people into the workplace at the origin of capitalism. Yet these days the violence is more visible, and the rebellions—from Chile to Quebec to Chicago, and including climate strikes on every continent—are louder, too. Neoliberalism tried to sell us on freedom not from work but through work. But a glance at today’s streets would seem to imply that we are no longer buying.25

  The simple reality of work under capitalism is that the worker doesn’t control much of anything on the job. That fact doesn’t change if the job is more or less pleasant, or if wages increase by a dollar an hour or by ten dollars an hour. The concept of alienation isn’t about your feelings; it’s about whether you have the power to decide where and how hard you will work, and whether you will control the thing you make or the service you provide.26

  Labor is required for value to be produced and capital accumulated, but that labor, as we’ve noted, is all too often likely to rebel against the process. Labor, after all, is us: messy, desiring, hungry, lonely, angry, frustrated human beings. We may be free to quit our jobs and find ones that we like better, as the mantra goes, but in practice that freedom is constrained by our need to eat, to have someplace to sleep, to have health care. Our place in the hierarchy of capitalist society is decided not by how hard we work but by any number of elements out of our control, including race, gender, and nationality. Work, as political theorist Kathi Weeks wrote, is a way that we are produced as social and political subjects.27

  Work, in other words, helps to tell us how to be. And changes in the shape of the workplace, in the shape of capitalism itself, have changed our expectations for what our lives will be like, for where and how we will find fulfillment. The concept of a “good” job is one that has changed over time and through struggle, a point we would do well to remember.

  THE IDEA THAT WORK SHOULD BE A SOURCE OF FULFILLMENT HAS BECOME common sense in our world, to the extent that saying otherwise is an act of rebellion. The Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci reminded us that common sense itself is a product of history, that popular beliefs are in fact material forces, and they change when material conditions change. His concept of hegemony explains to us how one group comes to arrange the world in its own interests, through culture and ideas as well as material forces. Hegemony is the process by which we are made to consent to the power structures that shape our lives.28

  The thing about common sense is that it’s often wrong. And we may even be aware on some level that it’s wrong. You are, after all, reading this book because something told you that maybe, just maybe, the problem is not you, it’s work. But we don’t have to truly believe in order to consent. Many of us simply act as if we believe, and that is enough.29

  Max Weber famously wrote of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the way that the rise of Protestantism lent a belief in hard work as a calling and deferred gratification (in Heaven) to the developing capitalism of the time. The first spirit of capitalism valued above all the accumulation of more and more money for its own sake, not for the sake of consumption. Consumption and other forms of pleasure were, in fact, to be avoided. One worked to be good, not to be happy. This process may have started with the church, but it had long since become common sense, Weber wrote. “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.”30

  French scholars Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have built on Weber to argue that the spirit of capitalism has changed over time, bringing with it new versions of the work ethic. The spirit of capitalism of each age, they wrote, must answer three questions: How will people secure a living for themselves and their families? How do they find enthusiasm for the process of accumulation, even if they are not going to pocket the profits? And how can they justify the system and defend it against accusations of injustice?31

  Justification of capitalism is necessary because people do challenge it. People look at its processes and see the inequality that has resulted. They rebel: they strike, they riot, they refuse to go quietly to work. Those challenges then force crises and changes in the system, which has to adapt, to find new justifications, new mechanisms by which we will consent to keep working. Those struggles spill over from the workplace into the rest of our lives. Political philosopher Nancy Fraser calls them “boundary struggles,” battles over the lines between economy and society, production and reproduction, work and family.32

  In the shifts created by these struggles, new work ethics and new spirits of capitalism
emerge. We know the spirit of the Fordist bargain—it’s the one depicted in a thousand nostalgic stories, where workers like Chuckie Denison went to the factory and came home to a family and had weekends off, vacations, and decent benefits. That family could afford to buy nice things on one income: a worker in the factory would have a wife in the home who did the work of looking after the children and shopping for the things the family needed. This was the era of the family wage, the “organization man,” the suburbs. Unlike the Protestant ethic, the industrial ethic promised at least some goods to workers now, rather than what the Industrial Workers of the World used to call “pie in the sky when you die.” Work was a path to social mobility, but whether people enjoyed doing it was still beside the point.33

  Something had to shift to get us from the industrial work ethic to today’s labor-of-love ethic, where we’re expected to enjoy work for its own sake. Today’s ideal workers are cheery and “flexible,” networked and net-savvy, creative and caring. They love their work but hop from job to job like serial monogamists; their hours stretch long and the line between the home and the workplace blurs. Security, the watchword of the industrial ethic, where workers spent a lifetime at one job and earned a pension on their way out the door, has been traded for fulfillment. And the things we used to keep for ourselves—indeed, the things the industrial workplace wanted to minimize—are suddenly in demand on the job, including our friendships, our feelings, and our love.34

  Working people didn’t just wake up one day and decide that this was how they wanted to be; the new work ethic was born from shifts in global capitalism. The spread of “globalization” meant that the unpleasant work could be shoved out of the rich countries into the poor ones, where labor was cheaper and governments easier to bully out of regulation. Boltanski and Chiapello argued that capitalism changed, too, in response to the struggles of its critics, the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. They identified two critiques: the “artistic” critique, which challenged the conformity of midcentury capitalism, decrying its fundamental boringness as oppressive; and the “social” critique, which focused on the fundamental inequalities of capitalist life, the way a few have their needs catered to while so many others, as geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore put it, face “organized abandonment.”35

  The social and artistic critiques mirror the two halves of the labor-of-love ethic: the caring and the creative work. Those halves together are the partial, inverted concessions to demands made by workers who rebelled against the factory and the social hierarchy, against the suburban bourgeois family and a world where everything was commodified. The movements of the 1960s had trouble integrating the two critiques: the demands simultaneously for more security and more autonomy. Into the cracks, capitalism was able to send tendrils that blossomed into a new spirit and a new shape of work.36

  In the 1970s, demands for workers’ control had sprung up across the industrialized world, from the Fiat factories in Italy to Lordstown, Ohio. In these workplaces the merging of the social and the artistic critique was most pronounced: workers, facing forty years breaking their bodies on an assembly line before retirement, struck back. Wildcat strikes were common in Lordstown in the early 1970s, where a diverse group of young workers rebelled against the very idea of work. They did not just demand more money, or even a share of the profits; they challenged the idea that anyone ought to spend their lives on an assembly line. But in the end, those workers wound up trading autonomy for security.37

  On the flip side of the rebellion against the Fordist factory was the rebellion against the suburban home. Women kicked against what Betty Friedan famously dubbed the “feminine mystique” of the suburban housewife, and what many of them demanded was more fulfilling, waged work. As they began to earn enough to be economically self-sufficient, a husband looked less necessary—a shift in the family form itself, which was destabilized even as the workplace was.38

  The difference between what the movements of the 1970s wanted and what they got was telling. They wanted democratic control over the firm; they got employee stock ownership plans. They wanted less work, a life less dominated by demands of the boss; they got fewer jobs and work fragmented into gigs. They wanted less hierarchical trade unions; they got union-busting. They wanted freedom for creative pursuits; they got, in Fisher’s terms, “managerialism and shopping.” They wanted to change their relationship to the patriarchal nuclear family; they got admonitions to see coworkers as family and the need to be constantly networking. They wanted more interesting work; they got simply more work. They wanted authentic human connection; they got demands to love their jobs.39

  WE ARE NOW LIVING WITH THE CONSEQUENCES OF A HISTORIC LOSS FOR working people, a shift in the global order that splintered the working class, pitting workers against each other while power and wealth reconsolidated in the hands of a few staggeringly wealthy folks at the top. Our current common sense about work has the story backward. It is not a victory to have work demand our love along with our time, our brains, and our bodies. The wild fantasies of those movements of the 1960s and 1970s for freedom and plenty were subverted; nothing, as the feminist activist and scholar Silvia Federici wrote, “so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.”40

  With industrial jobs waning, more and more of us are falling into jobs that require some version of the labor-of-love ethic. In the United States, the fields adding the most jobs are nursing, food service, and home health care, all gendered jobs where the worker is expected to care for other people. These kinds of service positions draw on the skills presumed to come naturally to women; they are seen as extensions of the caring work they are expected to do for their families. High on the job-growth list, too, are computer programmers, who might earn higher salaries but are also expected to demonstrate passion for their work—though they show it through their long hours more than in outpourings of emotion. Their work is closer to the jobs of other creatives—entertainers, perhaps, or journalists like myself—rooted in our old notions of artistic work.41

  If caring work is familial love, based in the all-sacrificing love of the mother, creative work is romantic love, based in a different kind of self-sacrifice and voluntary commitment that is expected, on some level, to love you back. Yet work never, ever loves you back.

  The compulsion to be happy at work, in other words, is always a demand for emotional work from the worker. Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love. This new work ethic, in which work is expected to give us something like self-actualization, cannot help but fail. Most jobs will not make us happy, and even the ones that do will often be a source of deep frustration—I am writing these words, for example, at 8:00 p.m., eating microwaved soup from its plastic container, having now spent twelve hours in front of a computer screen, and I have it pretty good. We might have the best possible boss in the world, one who does genuinely care about us, but they will remain a boss, and financial concerns will come first for them.42

  Capitalism shapes all of our lives—even under Fordism it reached well past the bounds of the workplace—and its disciplinary processes extend beyond what is necessary simply for extracting profits. Domination and subordination at work, as Kathi Weeks argued, are central to capitalism, and the workplace is where most people face the reality of how little freedom they have. As we look to the future, where debates over automation, a pandemic, and the climate crisis loom large, it is becoming increasingly clear that fewer of us than ever are needed to produce what is necessary for human flourishing. Our current world of work is helping to doom the Earth. Yet it remains nearly impossible to imagine a world where we have what we need whether or not we have jobs. Call it “workplace realism.”43

  How do we begin to break the love spell that work has us under? We might begin by understanding that love is a thing that happens between people. It is necessarily reciprocal, like solidarity. Love was once considered potentially subversive precisely because it encourage
d people to value something other than work. No wonder the workplace had to absorb it. Work cannot offer it, but other people can. And it is precisely those bonds of solidarity that extend beyond the transactional relationships of the workplace that can help us break free.

  Solidarity is another name for the bond between people that is forged in class struggle. Class is not a set of characteristics that inhere in certain people; it comes into existence, as historian E. P. Thompson wrote, “when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.” The irritants of class are felt often though not exclusively in the workplace, and it is often in the workplace that working people come to understand their power—or lack thereof.44

  The working class is not a stable entity or a fixed category. It is, rather, a thing that changes as conditions change, as capitalism changes and produces new work ethics to match its demands. The process we call “class composition” occurs as the workers whose labor and lives have been organized by capitalism begin to understand themselves as a class and to act accordingly in their collective interests. We can see that process happening now, as workers who might have assumed themselves middle-class start to understand that their relationship to power means they’re still workers. The video-game programmer might have more in common with the Uber driver than she previously thought.45