It’s roughly 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. I think about the day I’ve just had. I collaborated with colleagues on a story we’re producing for a podcast series. I had several meetings, many of them back-to-back. I texted constantly throughout all of those events with family members and friends. I worked through edits of a story while news alerts flickered across my computer monitor, over and over again, demanding my attention, my interest.
Suddenly, I realize I’ve been looking at a screen for more than thirteen hours straight. Did I get up to eat? Walk? Did I have a conversation with someone not over Zoom?
Suddenly, I realize I’ve been looking at a screen for more than thirteen hours straight. Did I get up to eat? Walk? Did I have a conversation with someone not over Zoom? I mentally parcel the rest of the day down into chunks and I’m back to the present, here, on this couch, reading. It’s 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, I’m still working, and that feels normal.
Cracking open Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, I’m confronted by the dualism of the modern experience of working: the wide gap between how we interpret ourselves as functioning, happy, dutiful laborers—perennially exclaiming we LOVE our work and we LOVE the company—and the truth that we are actually not in love with our jobs, because how can you love something that cannot love you back?
Jaffe offers a sweeping historical and sociological study of work, labor, and the emotional toll these things have taken on the development of humankind. She relies on sources as wide-ranging as the ancient Greeks and Angela Davis to talk about various case studies like the underbelly of Walmart, to the unionization efforts of the company Storycorps, to the story of an unpaid intern who worked on director Darren Aronovsky’s film Black Swan, just to name a few.
The book is also both structurally ambitious, combining essays on very specific industries such as domestic work, teaching, retail, nonprofits, art, academic, tech, sports, and of particular note, interns as it is a narrative feat. In each chapter, Jaffe spends time interviewing sources with memorable struggles in their relative industries.
The most lucid moments in Jaffe’s writing come in the form of her blunt redefinitions of commonplace ideas. There are several of these brilliant sentences throughout the pages: “The labor of love, of short, is a con”; “Charity is a relationship of power”; and “programming, a field currently dominated by young men, was invented by a woman,” to name a few. Her take on how interns are told to work for free on the promise of future employment perhaps hit the hardest: “What really defines the intern, after all, is hope.”
Every case study Jaffe examines is handled with care and rigorous reporting. But the chapter that felt the most urgent to me is the one on teachers. The occupation operates in a space, Jaffe argues, where devotion and love for the work is intrinsic to the value of the job.
“Teachers occupy an uneasy place in our understanding of the world,” she writes. “Expected to be a reservoir of emotional and intellectual support for new generations, they become a receptacle for all the blame when their teaching does not manage to overcome all the obstacles placed in their student’s way.”
“Teachers are,” she concludes, “perhaps the ultimate laborers of love.”
Pairing these insights with the educational challenges that the country has faced in the COVID-19 pandemic, Jaffe spends a considerable amount of time looking at the ways collective action has improved teachers’ working conditions. In New York City, for example, teachers mobilized to pressure the Department of Education to close schools by organizing and building momentum for a sick-out, a movement that led the department to finally listen.
“Teachers’ fraught location in public life can be an immensely powerful one,” Jaffe notes, “if they use the skills they’ve honed on the job—caring, communicating—and their ability to disrupt the day-to-day functioning of a city or state to see that their demands are met.”
What undergirds Jaffe’s range of case studies is her central point that love and work should not be in bed together and that it’s our job, even if we do love what we do, to deliberately separate them.
What undergirds Jaffe’s range of case studies is her central point that love and work should not be in bed together and that it’s our job, even if we do love what we do, to deliberately separate them. We can and should demand more for ourselves, and for the companies that employ us to treat us better.
But even as she reminds us of the importance of collective action, Jaffe reiterates that, no matter how much we’re pressured to love our employers, one key fact remains the same: we can love ourselves, our lives, and the people in them, but ultimately, a company can not.
As she writes, this relationship between devotion to our jobs, as if to a lover, romantic partner, or close friend, is not something to valorize: “It is not a victory to have work demand our love along with our time, our brains, and our bodies.”
You can read an excerpt from Sarah Jaffe’s new book, Work Won’t Love You Back, here.