Sarah Jaffe

A deeply-reported examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives. You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love. In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth -- the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries -- from the unpaid intern, to the overworked teacher, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete -- Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work. As Jaffe argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.

How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

Work Won't Love You Back

Katy Watkins

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.

[T]he family as we know it actually serves to smooth the functioning of capitalism: it reproduces workers, without whom capitalism can't function.

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.

The division between "home" and "workplace" didn't exist in feudal Europe in the way it began to exist under capitalism. In early medieval cities, women worked as doctors, butchers, teachers, retailers, and smiths. They had gained a degree of freedom. In precapitalist Europe, Silvia Federici wrote, "women's subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets." Under capitalism, though, "women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations." 

[T]he work of parenting is not considered important enough to pay for, yet if you demonstrate that you have other priorities beyond the home, you'll be castigated as a bad mother. the lines have always been permeable and shifting, but that has only made stigma harder to evade.

The family-wage ideal spread rapidly. While labor liked it as a way to raise pay, it also served to bolster gender roles within the family. Becoming a "provider was a way for working-class men to take pride and power in the home that they didn't have on the assembly line; it allowed them to define their manliness against those who did not bring home a decent wage. And, particularly in the United States, that also meant, for white men, defining their masculinity against workers of color. Black workers in the United States first labored as slaves, their marriages and reproduction directly appropriated by the slaveholder. When they were emancipated, a new set of laws encouraged former slaves into "traditional" families. As historian Tera Hunter has noted, under the conditions of slavery, where blood kin or spouses could be sold off at any moment on the slaveholder's whim, African Americans "transformed the strict definition of kinship," understanding the family in a more expansive way.

[A]s labor laws finally put in place some protections for the right of workers to unionize, that the family wageand with it, the white working-class family--became institutions. This was what was known as the Fordist compromise. Henry Ford himself was deeply invested in implementing his idea of the correct family. In order to get the "family wage, employees had to qualify-and Ford had an entire department of investigators, called the Sociological Department, who would interrogate workers on the job and show up at their homes to ensure that wives were working hard too. "Full-time domesticity on the part of the wife was required," sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin wrote. "Anything less would run afoul of the investigators. "

That the welfare rights movement came within a fingertip of seeing a law that would have guaranteed income for anyone regardless of marital status or employment enacted by a conservative president should remind us that it is possible to imagine work and the family differently.

Conservative opponents of same-sex marriage rights have argued that allowing queer people to marry would destroy the institution of marriage. But, as gender and sexuality professor Laura Briggs and others have noted, it's not gay marriage that has blasted open the family. Instead, it is economic inequality helping to splinter the family as we knew it. The birth rate itself has fallen since the 1970s: as Silvia Federici archly wrote, "the only true labor saving devices women have used in the 70s have been contraceptives." She also noted that the assault on abortion rights underway in much of the world has been an attempt to regulate the labor supply.

People with disabilities have also turned the need for care and support into radical political demands, communities of care, and a defense of the idea that there are things more important than one's ability to hold a job. Unable to work in the ways that capitalism values, disability theorist Sunuara Taylor wrote, "disabled people have to find meaning in other aspects of their lives and this meaning is threatening to our culture's value system.

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