Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  If the working class, broadly, consists of people who, when they go to work, are not the boss, who have little individual power to set the terms of their labor—even if, like an Uber driver or a freelance journalist, there’s no one peering over their shoulder each moment—that is a huge swath of society.46

  Today’s working class is more diverse in race and gender than our image of the hard-hatted worker of the recent past, or even the “he” of Thompson’s framing. Trump’s trip to the Carrier plant, where he posed for a photo op with young Black women workers, reminds us that those women make up plenty of even what’s left of the industrial workforce. The working class has never been all male or all white or all industrial, but, as historian Gabriel Winant noted, it is these days defined by “feminization, racial diversification, and increasing precarity: care work, immigrant work, low-wage work, and the gig economy.” Working-class life is shaped as well by the world outside the workplace, where housing is harder to come by and education and health care more costly, where policing is harsher and care responsibilities double on top of the demands of the paid workplace, where immigration agents hound workers out of the country. Technology allows bosses to slice and dice schedules for retail workers, to demand that office staffers work from home at all hours, and to supervise app-based workers from a distance to squeeze more out of them. And one of the key things that many of these workers have in common is that they are whipsawed by the labor-of-love myth.47

  The workers you will meet in this book have challenged the idea that their work should be provided solely out of love and draw our attention to a key concept that is too often forgotten or misused: the idea of exploitation.

  Exploitation is not merely extra-bad work, or a job you particularly dislike. These are the delusions foisted on us by the labor-of-love myth. Exploitation is wage labor under capitalism, where the work you put in produces more value than the wages you are paid are worth. Exploitation is the process by which someone else profits from your labor. This is true whether you’re a nanny making $10 an hour, allowing your employer to make much more money at her higher-paid job, or a programmer at Google making $200,000 a year while Google rakes in over $7 billion. The labor of love is just the latest way that this exploitation is masked. But increasingly, workers are stripping away that mask.48

  In these pages, you will meet many of the new laborers of love. They are video-game programmers and high school history teachers, artists and Toys “R” Us employees. They have organized collective spaces, national campaigns, and unions; lobbied for legislation; and gone on strike to demand better treatment as workers. Through their stories, we will trace the way the labor-of-love ethic has expanded, moving outward from narrow parts of the working world to encompass more and more of the jobs available in today’s workplaces in our postindustrial nations.

  In Part One, we will follow the labor of love as it moves from women’s unpaid work in the home through paid domestic work, teaching, retail work, and the nonprofit sector. Other forms of work that could just as easily have gone into this section include nursing, grocery store work, restaurant work, and call center jobs. It is worth noting that much of this work is the “essential” or “key” work of the coronavirus pandemic: these workers are the people expected to risk their lives to keep going to work in order for the rest of us to survive. In these jobs workers are expected to provide service with a smile or genuine, heartfelt care; they are expected to put themselves second to the feelings and needs of their customers or charges.

  In the second half of the book, we’ll move to the other half of the story. We’ll see how our myth of the starving, devoted artist has leapt from art workers to unpaid interns, precarious academics, computer programmers, and even professional athletes. We could also add TV producers and actors, illustrators, musicians, and writers to that list—these are workers who are expected to find the work itself rewarding, as a place to express their own unique selves, their particular genius. In these jobs, we’re likely to be told that we should be grateful to be able to work in the field at all, as there are hundreds of people who wish they had the opportunity to do jobs half as cool.

  These workers have pushed back against the idea that their work should be provided solely out of love, though many of them still do genuinely enjoy their work. They have discovered the pleasures that are to be found in rebellion, in collective action, in solidarity, in standing shoulder to shoulder on the picket line, in carving out spaces and times to be with other working people and to change the conditions of their labor. They have laid claim to their time and their hearts and minds outside of the workplace.

  I invite you to join them.

  PART ONE

  WHAT WE MIGHT CALL LOVE

  CHAPTER 1

  NUCLEAR FALLOUT

  The Family

  RAY MALONE FOUND OUT SHE WAS PREGNANT WHILE SHE WAS WORKING on her first musical theater project.

  She was in her late twenties at the time, living in London, and finding her political voice. “It was 2014, like six days before I found out I was pregnant,” she said, when she saw an ad to apply to perform at a feminist arts festival. It was in the days before Brexit, when the UK Independence Party (UKIP) was in the news agitating against immigration and the European Union. “UKIP seemed like such a joke, and [its leaders] were constantly saying such ridiculous things,” Malone said. Their obsession with traditional gender roles convinced her to design a UKIP swing dance performance, so she joined forces with another theater-maker who was planning a UKIP-themed cabaret.

  It had been a shock to discover her pregnancy. “It was quite violent,” she explained. “They thought I had an ectopic pregnancy because I was in so much pain. I had a cyst that turned out to be the size of an orange.” She also learned she had endometriosis, and with that discovery came the realization that this pregnancy might be her only chance to have the child she knew she wanted.

  Malone is a slight woman, pale and petite, with artist’s hands that are usually moving, occupied—embroidering, gesturing. She lights up when she’s telling a story, and you can see the charisma she’d project onstage.

  She danced through her pregnancy, in a big wig and exaggerated feminine silhouette, embodying and mocking all the stereotypes of womanhood she’d lived with all her life. “My daughter is really musical—that’s why,” she laughed. It was her first political theater project, and she worked alongside activist groups, adding numbers to go along with outrageous things that politicians said. “There was a UKIP councilor that said that floods were caused by gay people, so we had a troupe of gay men singing, ‘It’s Raining Men.’” They took the cabaret to the hometown of Nigel Farage, UKIP’s founder and public face, and tried to conga into the pub across the street one night when he turned up there. They were chased off. But Farage came out to confront them—and then told the press he’d been harassed by leftists chasing his children. Farage was in the Daily Mail “calling us scum,” Malone said.1

  Back in London after the event, the performers gathered to hold a debrief, and the white nationalist group Britain First turned up and attempted to intimidate them. “I remember thinking, ‘Don’t get stressed out because it would be really bad for the baby,’” she said. “The Britain First people were like, ‘We’re going to teach you to scare people’s kids!’ ‘You’re the lefty witch who is chasing good children,’” she said. But her friends shouted back, “There’s a pregnant woman in here!” “We were like, ‘No, I’m the good woman.’”

  “This has been my journey of being a mother,” she said. She felt haunted by these tropes: good mother, bad mother. She’d worried about being a single parent because of her own upbringing in what she described as “quite a patriarchal family, really.” She struggled too with the presumption that working-class women have children solely in order to get benefits.

  Malone was born in North Wales; she’s the youngest of six children by several years. By the time she came along, her parents were more economically secure than they’d b
een early on, though they described themselves, she said, as working class. Her father was an English teacher and a climbing instructor; her mother had left school young and taken an arts job. “We’re all quite creative, and I think we all get it from my mom working in this art shop when she was sixteen,” she said. Her father, too, had a creative influence—the poet John Cooper Clarke credited her father’s teaching with inspiring him to write. John Malone would tell his students, “Write like the greats, but write about what you know”—a line Malone has taken to heart in her own art practice.

  Being an artist, she noted, is insecure work. She asked herself, “Am I kidding myself to think I could raise a child by doing this? You can feed yourself beans on bread for a week, but you can’t have an undernourished child because you want a career in the arts.”

  The father of her baby was someone she’d been close to for a while—they’d run a theater company together—and so they decided to try co-parenting, but their relationship didn’t last. Realizing she would need more support once the baby arrived, and looking at London rents, in her eighth month of pregnancy she decided to move to Sheffield to be near her sister.

  Her sister helped support her, bringing her food parcels; in turn, Malone helped with her sister’s kids. “You are so vulnerable when you’ve just had a child,” she noted. “You see a health visitor once in a while that asks, ‘Are you all right? Is your baby sleeping through the night?’ They are not going to ask, ‘How have you coped moving two hundred miles away from where you know anybody, with a young child, and when you don’t know what you’re doing for the rest of your life?’” The political situation didn’t help. The United Kingdom had become incredibly polarized around Brexit. She missed the community of the cabaret.

  Just before her daughter Nola’s first birthday, a friend from the theater called with an offer to do a show in Greece. Malone directed a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest for an all-women theater company on the island of Lesbos with Nola on her hip. It was idyllic: “I was surrounded by this big group of women who would look after my daughter all the time, I was directing theater in the sunshine.”

  But at the end of the show, she and Nola returned to a cottage in “pretty much the middle of nowhere.” Manchester was a twenty-minute train ride away, but getting there with a small child was difficult. “It was really isolating.” The cottage was free and she was out of work, but being completely alone was getting to her. “Not everybody has a child in the ‘right’ way,” she noted, with a partner and a mortgage. “Being an artist, you often feel that your occupation is a luxury and your whole identity, then, feels like you are playacting being something.” She’d studied theater through graduate school, and didn’t want to give it up after all that investment. But, she noted, “it is a big question for lots of actors: How long do you keep going with it?” She’d worked in Russia, briefly, years earlier, as a governess for a wealthy family, and seeing that wealth had given her more resolve to want to continue making art. “There are less and less working-class voices in the art world,” she said.

  So when the chance came to do The Tempest again, this time in London, she was thrilled. Nola could be closer to her father, and Malone could get paid to do theater. At first, though, making ends meet in London was nearly impossible. “I lived in a shared house for a while that turned out to be a nightmare, living in a bedsit type of situation with a two-year-old.” From there, she wound up essentially homeless, hopping from house-sitting gig to house-sitting gig. “It was really, really stressful,” she said. “We don’t know where we’re going to be. We’ve got no money. We’re on our own.”

  She was living on Universal Credit, the United Kingdom’s new benefits system, while taking on occasional gigs—“any old job”—and getting some support from her daughter’s father. Living close to him, though, means being “a very poor person living in a very wealthy pocket of London.” Receiving Universal Credit comes with stigma—especially, she noted, in that wealthy area—and people don’t consider raising a daughter to be work. “I tried to get my daughter into a different nursery,” Malone said. “They were like, ‘Oh, you have to pay £150 a month.’” The woman at the nursery asked more questions about money, and Malone explained that she was on Universal Credit but her ex was a teacher. “The woman on the phone at the nursery was like, ‘We do find that people are rewarded if they work.’ It was like a knife in the stomach, like, ‘You’re not a proper member of society.’”

  When she was house-hopping, Malone said, the local council offered to rehouse her in Birmingham. With the housing benefit capped below market rental rates, for many people the only option is to leave London—but in London, Malone has the support of her former partner. “We waste so much money in rent,” she said. “I have to think, ‘God, what else could that be spent on? Could my daughter have music lessons? Could we have a holiday if we weren’t spending so much money on rent?’”

  Searching for a full-time job, though, presented even more problems. To keep receiving Universal Credit, she had to make periodic visits to the job center, and the program’s requirements get stricter as your child grows older. By the time Nola was three, Malone was expected to be looking for full-time work and required to turn up at the job center regularly for meetings with a “work coach.” But child care, even with Nola in school, is hard to come by, and it made her question whether it was worth it to get a job. The stress that parents are under, she noted, is constant. “Women are having their kids taken off them because of a variety of stresses that they are under because of poverty, because of austerity, because the situation that we’re in is awful. I’m somebody with a postgraduate education that has still found a huge amount of struggle. It is a really difficult thing to talk about. You don’t want to seem like a bad mother.”2

  LOVE IS WOMEN’S WORK. THIS IS THE LESSON YOUNG GIRLS ARE TAUGHT from the time they are born; girl babies are dressed in pink, the color of Valentine’s Day. As they grow up they are encouraged in a thousand tiny ways to pay close attention to the needs of the people around them, to smile and to be pleasing to the eye. Gender roles are reinforced first and foremost in the family, and the family, even in this supposedly postfeminist era, revolves around the unpaid work of taking care of others. Failure to do that work properly, as Ray Malone said, results in the charge of “bad mother,” which often just translates to “bad woman.”3

  The labor of love begins, then, in the home. We are still told that the work of cleaning and cooking, of nursing wounds, of teaching children to walk and talk and read and reason, of soothing hurt feelings and smoothing over little crises, comes naturally to women. These things are assumed not to be skills, not to be learned, as other skills are, through practice. And this assumption has crept from the home into the workplaces of millions of people—not all of them women—and has left them underpaid, overstretched, and devalued. Our willingness to accede that women’s work is love, and that love is its own reward, not to be sullied with money, creates profits for capital.

  None of this is natural. The family itself was and is a social, economic, and political institution. It developed alongside other such institutions—capitalism and the state—and, like them, developed as a mechanism of controlling and directing labor, in this case, the labor of women. As historian Stephanie Coontz wrote, to mourn the decline of the two-heterosexual-parent nuclear family is to be nostalgic for “the way we never were,” for a situation that never included everyone and by which few were well served. It is to lament the crumbling of an edifice designed to keep women’s labor cheap or free.4

  The work ethic and the family ethic developed together and they are still intertwined. When we hear of “work-life balance,” it is all too often in stories of women trying to find time outside of the office to spend with their families. The family, in other words, is presented as being in competition with the demands of capitalism. But theorists as far back as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have pointed out that the family as we know it actually serves to
smooth the functioning of capitalism: it reproduces workers, without whom capitalism can’t function. This is why we call all of that caring, cooking, and soothing, along with the literal process of bearing children, “reproductive labor.” If the family is in crisis, it is because capitalism is in crisis—and if we can see the cracks now, it is because the stories we have been told about these institutions have ceased to paper over reality.5

  There is nothing natural about a two-parent, two-point-five-child picket-fence household, any more than there is anything natural about the car that carts it around. It is a creation of history, a history that involves plenty of violence and struggle as well as what we think of as evolution. The one “natural” fact of reproduction, Coontz and anthropologist Peta Henderson wrote, is that the people we came to think of as women were “society’s source of new members.” A division of reproductive labor, though, did not automatically mean that one type of labor would end up paid, valorized, and mythologized while the other was devalued and presumed not to be work at all.6

  Scholars disagree on the exact causes of male dominance, or what we might call patriarchy. But they have given us clues as to how we ended up in a world where women still do most of the unpaid labor. As early humans began to produce more than they could consume, individually or as a group, they began to exchange products with other groups, as well as to exchange members, in some version of what we now call marriage. As those products became private property, to be handed down through the family line, control of reproduction—as well as the other labors women were expected to perform—became more important to men. Women were not simply oppressed, in other words, but exploited.7