Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  The players got their contract. It included the maternity protections that Duggan has now availed herself of, as she gave birth to her and her wife’s first child on February 29, 2020. It also included travel and insurance provisions that equal the men’s national team and a $2,000-a-month stipend year-round for training. They got a pool of prize money to be split each year and bonuses for winning medals—which they promptly did. They also won a Women’s High Performance Advisory Group within USA Hockey, to work to grow the women’s game, modeled after a similar group within Canadian women’s hockey. The argument Duggan had made to the younger women she called had been proved right: they had made gains for everyone who would come after them.54

  But the women weren’t done. They won the world championships when the boycott was called off, and they topped that off the next year with Olympic gold to go with Duggan’s two silvers, beating Canada. The NHL started featuring some of the women stars at its All-Star game. Off the ice, though, the US and Canadian women were overcoming their rivalry to start planning something bigger. They wanted an international women’s professional league with real money behind it. And they’d realized from their successful organizing that the way to get to one was to bring players together. Girls’ hockey was growing—aided by their successful fight, certainly—and the women wanted something better than the barebones leagues they were playing in.55

  The stakes grew higher when the CWHL abruptly shut down in the spring of 2019, leaving many players without work. And so the women went public with their new organization: the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA). “It is basically a movement of a lot of passionate players to try to create a better future for the sport, just like we have been trying to do all along,” Duggan said. The PWHPA’s statement said, “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for—our moment to come together and say we deserve more. It’s time for a long-term viable professional league that will showcase the greatest product of women’s professional hockey in the world.” With 173 dues-paying members from the United States, Canada, and Europe, the association aimed to build a more sustainable base for the sport, and to press those interested in it to take action. Billie Jean King was one of their advisers.56

  With the PWHPA, they once again decided to withhold their labor—this time from any existing professional league, which in this case meant the NWHL. Instead, they put together a tour; picked up sponsors, including Budweiser and Dunkin’ Donuts; and traveled, playing games and scrimmages and holding community events to drum up support. Duggan, who was pregnant over the winter of 2019–2020, wasn’t playing, but she remained deeply involved. “The tour games have been awesome, the support from fans and people who are invested,” she said. “I’m not going to lie: it is still a grind. We are still not where we need to be. There is no woman in the PWHPA that is being paid anything this year to play professional women’s hockey. In my opinion, things had to get worse before they get better.” In perhaps their biggest victory, the NHL featured members of the PWHPA in a three-on-three exhibition game on All-Star Weekend in 2020. “I think to be on that stage was so special. With an All-Star Weekend you might introduce people that haven’t really watched a lot of hockey before to the women’s game, as well. I’m definitely thankful to the NHL for giving us that platform and that opportunity to continue to be visible and certainly hope for more growth and opportunity in those areas in the future,” she said.

  The PWHPA had to postpone part of its planned tour when the coronavirus outbreak began. First, three games in Japan, scheduled for late February against the Japanese national team, were canceled, and then more of the tour was canceled as well. However, the association announced plans to keep going into 2020–2021, basing players in “hub cities” where they could train, practice in front of audiences, and have dedicated support staff. Despite the pandemic, corporate sponsors for the association had indicated continued support. And despite the cancellation of the world championships for the year, players continued to train.57

  When her former elementary school gym teacher came down with the virus, Duggan stepped up and recorded workout videos for the students. “I wanted to do everything that I could,” she told reporters. “For whatever reason, I remember just as a middle schooler and elementary school kid, just connecting with her. She was someone who I looked up to athletically, because she was such a great athlete and I was an aspiring athlete at that age. She and others in my community have supported my Olympic journey, for really the last 20 years of my life.”58

  “It is a great time to be a female athlete right now. There is a lot of power and a lot of energy,” Duggan said. That power and energy, despite the myriad roadblocks, kept her going off the ice. Memories, too, of the breakthroughs on the ice reminded her of the commitment she’d made to the sport. She recalled as particularly powerful the moment when the US team won the world championship, right after the threatened boycott. The massive, sold-out crowd on home ice in Michigan included, of course, the bosses they’d just been battling. “We were energized by everything we had been through prior to that. I remember Hilary Knight scored the game-winning goal in overtime and the way we celebrated and rejoiced with each other was extra-special that time,” she said. “‘See! We told you we were worth something!’”

  CONCLUSION

  WHAT IS LOVE?

  We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love.

  —Silvia Federici1

  WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH YOUR TIME IF YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO WORK?

  I love asking people this question. Sitting on a hill in Columbus, Ohio, in 2012, I learned that a woman I knew as a political organizer actually trained to be a dancer. When I went to Indianapolis and asked the workers from the Carrier and Rexnord plants what they’d do if money wasn’t an object, one said he’d like to be a fishing guide. Another wanted more time to spend with his family, thought maybe he’d start a small business with his sons. But they always circled back around to the reality: money was an issue. They did need to work. To spend too much time thinking about what they’d do if the world was otherwise just seemed to underscore the reality rather than provide an escape from it. Work was not a choice.

  Work has not brought us liberation, freedom, or even much joy. There are occasional pleasures to be had on the job, certainly—as a writer, I take pride in a well-turned sentence, and as a reporter, I thrill to a good interview. Even as a restaurant server I enjoyed the occasional chat with a regular customer. I am not arguing that we should strive to be miserable at work—quite the contrary, we should take any opportunity for happiness, pleasure, and connection that we get. I do believe, however, that our desire for happiness at work is one that has been constructed for us, and the world that constructed that desire is falling apart around us. As it does so, we suddenly have space to think about a different world, and what we might want once it is here.2

  The workers you have met over the course of this book have all fought, in one way or another, to have their work recognized and valued as work. For them, it has mattered to be seen and understood as doing something not purely out of selfless (or for that matter selfish) love. They were not amateurs, hobbyists, or members of a “family.” They might have chosen a field that required years of training and sacrifice, or they might have just filled out an application on a whim, but they all understood somewhere along the line that their choices were not limitless, that they could not just expect to be paid for whatever they wanted to do, that even within their labors of love, they were making money for someone else, and they were doing it to get by.

  The labor-of-love myth is cracking under its own weight. For every worker that I included in this book, for every occupation, there were twenty or thirty more that I couldn’t fit. Every conversation I had while in the process of writing seemed to involve someone suggesting an example that would belong in these pages. I spoke with actors, hairdressers, bartenders, therapists, social workers, museum staffers, lawyers, nurses, political o
rganizers, elected officials, and other journalists who immediately offered up stories from their own lives that could have gone in this book.

  The myth is cracking because work itself no longer works. It no longer pays what it used to: wages have stagnated for most working people since Reagan and Thatcher’s time. The professions are suffering cutbacks, and a college degree no longer gets you a guaranteed middle-class job. The 2008 financial crisis shifted the neoliberal era into what sociologist Will Davies dubbed “punitive neoliberalism,” with increasing punishments heaped on those who would not comply even as compliance became, under austerity, ever harder. Prisons are growing, social services shrinking, jobs that are halfway decent barely exist. The pandemic exposed the failures of the American health-care system and the brutality of “essential” work for those who had no choice but to keep going to their jobs despite the heightened danger. Those whom journalist Paul Mason famously called the “graduates with no future” are everywhere, and they are angry. Teachers across the United States began a strike wave in 2012 that shows no signs of stopping, with at least sixteen states having seen educators walk off the job demanding better conditions, and the pandemic only lending new urgency to their organizing. Art museum staffers and journalists have passed around collectively written Google documents comparing salaries and have used that information in their union drives. And protests have filled the streets from Greece to Chile to France to the United States, repeatedly demanding an end to the austerity measures that have heightened the crisis of work and broader social changes. Feminist rebellions challenge patriarchy on the job and in the home. Massive global uprisings followed the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, pulling down and setting alight monuments to white supremacy and challenging the state’s monopoly on violence. The promises made to a generation of hope laborers are being revealed for the lies they are.3

  We cannot simply go back to a time before neoliberalism: the return to the Fordist bargain and to the factory is not a thing that anyone should be wishing for, even if it were possible to turn back the clock. That model of capitalism destroyed the planet in order to provide benefits for a relative few, and neoliberalism simply sped up the process. Capitalist hegemony is collapsing before our eyes. The positive ideals of freedom, choice, and fulfilling work are increasingly unsellable to a public that can see now the realities behind those pipe dreams. The exposure of capitalism’s cruelty makes the command to love our jobs a brutal joke. We are, to steal a term from the feminist movement of the 1960s, having our consciousness raised. Capitalist realism has had a thousand growing cracks put in it since the 2008 financial crisis, and at any moment now it could shatter entirely.4

  And all this breakdown is happening in a moment of deep ecological crisis. As Alyssa Battistoni, a fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Environment, wrote, “to put it bluntly, we’re confronted with the fact that human activity has transformed the entire planet in ways that are now threatening the way we inhabit it—some of us far more than others.” We cannot, Battistoni pointed out, move forward “without tackling environmentalism’s old stumbling blocks: consumption and jobs.” Public-sector cutbacks increase private consumption, she wrote—personal cars rather than trains, private yards rather than public parks, bottled water if the tap water is bad—and our culture of work itself contributes to the problem. A 2019 report from UK think tank Autonomy posed the question, “Rather than discussing how to maximize economic performance (all too often a code for forcing the vast majority of the population to work long hours to the benefit of capital owners), the climate crisis forces us to change the conversation and raise the question: provided current levels of carbon intensity of our economies and current levels of productivity, how much work can we afford?” Massive reductions in working time are not only desirable, as work is increasingly miserable—they are necessary.5

  THESE DAYS, FREE TIME IS A LUXURY THAT FEW CAN AFFORD. WE HAVE both done away with and strangely re-created the society of the ancient Greeks, where many of us are so busy with work that actually being informed members of society feels impossible, and political and social engagement are indulgences for the wealthy. We have turned into work the things that we might have done for pleasure, and then made even that relatively pleasant work accessible to only a few.

  The Greeks built a democracy around the idea that work would be done by someone else, whether slaves, banausoi, or the laboring classes, who were denied rights to participate in the activities that constituted citizenship. Citizens’ work was praxis, what Guy Standing described as “work done for its own sake, to strengthen personal relationships.” It was the work of what we call social reproduction, of the creation of a public communal life. They valued this work but also differentiated it from true leisure time, which they valued for its own sake. Free time was necessary, as was learning and caring, in order to participate fully in society.6

  We’ve been thinking about whether machines could do the work, a sort of automated laboring class, at least since George Orwell found his way to Wigan Pier, or perhaps since Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.” Could automation, rather than taking away working-class livelihood and identity, free us to do something else entirely? We hear “robots are coming for our jobs” as a threat, but in fact it could be a way to create more free time for all. It will depend on who creates, designs, and owns the robots, or the algorithms. But the obsession with technology misses the point: we are not locked in some John Henry–style competition, man vs. steam engine, to prove who is superior. Rather, we are all locked into a system of production in which we must work in order to survive, even as production needs fewer actual human hands than ever.7

  Work does not love us back: that much we can, I hope, agree upon. A society where we must work the majority of our waking hours will never deliver us happiness, even if we are the lucky few who have jobs in which we do gain some joy. As Silvia Federici wrote, “nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.”8

  Capitalist society has transformed work into love, and love, conversely, into work. Capital, Selma James wrote, takes “who we could be and limits us to who we are. It takes our time, which happens to be our life.” But we are beginning to change our minds about our priorities, whether capital likes it or not. Surveys find more people rating “working hours are short, lots of free time” as a characteristic of a desirable job over time, while their desire for “important” work went down. This was true among the highly educated as well as the less educated, though the perception of each might differ—as Ray Malone (from Chapter 1) pointed out, a mother on Universal Credit wanting to take more time with her child would be stigmatized as lazy, while a well-off mother leaving a high-powered job to do so just wants “work-life balance” (though she might, too, face criticism for failing to “Lean In”).9

  But a side effect of all this love for work has been that talking about love between people has lost its importance. To talk of love is to risk being seen as unserious, particularly if you are a woman. Instead, our personal relationships are to be squeezed in around the edges, fitted into busy schedules, or sacrificed entirely to the demands of the workplace. Working-class women, in particular, are choosing to remain single even to raise children, finding that men’s job-market problems make them poor bets for long-term partners. That this is a horrible calculation to have to make seems not to bother the powerful. (And too many people still assume that interpersonal relationships only matter if they are heterosexual couplings, leaving out a vast spectrum of ways that people form caring relationships.) The shreds of the neoliberal work ethic have turned our hearts into appointment books; the rhetoric of the factory, as cultural critic Laura Kipnis wrote in her polemic Against Love, has become “the default language of love.” Love, for the working class in particular, is a complicated affair.10

  It’s not just romantic relationships that have suffered under neoliberalism. Friendship, too, is a casualty of the
way our working lives are organized. A 2014 study found that one in ten people in the United Kingdom did not have a close friend; in a 2019 poll in the United States, one in five of the millennials surveyed reported being friendless. These studies reflected, a reporter noted, “long-term rising trends in loneliness.” The extended lockdown period of the coronavirus pandemic only exacerbated feelings of isolation that so many already had. We might have Facebook friends, but do we have real ones? People have tried to blame the Internet for our collective loneliness, but in fact it comes alongside the change in our working lives, the decline of unions and other institutions that gave people a sense of shared purpose and direction beyond just the job. When I asked the union activists at the Rexnord plant what they’d miss when it closed down, they all mentioned their friends and the union. Not the work itself.11