Sarah Jaffe’s title should serve as both a grim reminder and a rallying cry for living differently: Work Won’t Love You Back. You can likely infer Jaffe’s central conceit already: we invest love into our jobs, which are increasingly exploitative. The introduction to the book and its conclusion offer its framework, which is somewhat complex. Essentially, capitalism degrades human interaction (consider how many times, for example, you have not seen family or friends because you have too much work to do or because you’re too exhausted from the week, etc. or how many times you’re meeting with a friend in a brief, transactional way localized around a coffee shop.) In response, we’re encouraged to find meaning in our work, rather than seeing it as purely transactional. This creates a context in which we must love our work, and that love paves the way for our own exploitation: we are willing to sacrifice our well-being because we misplace our love.
The argument felt resonant and reminded me of a line from Charles Bukowski’s 1975 novel Factotum that has lingered with me since I read it: “it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.” It’s a miserable double bind: either hate your job and live miserably most of the time or love your job and sacrifice your other loves to it, pursuing what you find meaningful. Jaffe is looking for an alternative.
I have to admit that I felt a little let down by Work Won’t Love You Back and that it’s almost definitely my fault. I built it up in my head that the book would teach me how to solve my unhealthy relationship with work, but the book is less of a self-help manual and more of a catalogue of how different types of workers are exploited. To Jaffe’s credit, there are a lot of well-researched case studies that trace a clear historical throughline. She offers incisive commentary on a range of industries and documents the labour movements that tried to change things.
When I consider some of the highlight chapters, of course I was geared up for the one about teaching. I was hoping for some more guidance on how to navigate the exploitation of teachers, although the chapter seemed to reignite some of my frustrations rather than offer me a clear solution. I should mention, at least, that the point is not to aim for individual action and to further burden strained employees—only collective action can help to restructure the conditions that exploit us. Perhaps because I have less experience in the field, I was more interested in the parallel chapter about academia. Considering the wages, publication “opportunities”, and unpaid labour that goes into research and higher level teaching, that chapter seemed a natural outgrowth of the teaching one and I found it pretty illuminating.
Another chapter that really spoke to me is the one about art. Arguably, artists are some of the most exploited workers out there. Everyone assumes that artists create out of love (indeed, all artwork is deep down a desire to express and connect with others). Since we all hold the fundamental belief that creating art is enriching to the human spirit, we typically do not see art as being something deserving of financial recompense. Think of all the times artists are paid “in exposure.” The chapter does wonders to expose how much labour goes into creating artwork and how little recompense it receives.
Work Won’t Love You Back leads to two chapters that are more explicitly focused on work-as-play. There is a chapter about the tech industry, where employees at video game companies are expected to put up with insane crunch hours because they have ‘fun’ jobs. Video game testers are sometimes paid by-the-bug, meaning that they might play games for hours with no remuneration. Jaffe mentions, also, the rampant sexism and racism in the gaming industry (as with other fields of work, and with women in particular bearing the brunt of sexist wages). Similarly, the final chapter discusses the unpaid work of athletes—with women athletes in particular maybe earning 20-30k while their male counterparts get high six figure salaries. She discusses the lack of pay—and often lack of education—for college athletes while their owners degrade and profit from them (at least one Black player drawing the parallel to the slave trade). All the while, sports workers trying to advocate for better treatment are routinely punished by management.
All this to say, Jaffe offers a clear overview of how different industries rely on our love of work to exploit us and how that love ought to be redirected to more meaningful forms of connection—-to our actual families, our actual friends. When we have a lack of love, we are more susceptible to the wiles of capitalism—more likely to spend, to accept worse for ourselves, and so on. When our main source of love is our own love of work, we will continue to let work crush us.
So: Work Won’t Love You Back. It’s time to take a step back and find love for ourselves.
Happy reading!
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