Favorite Quotes from “Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs, Exploited, and Alone” by Sarah Jaffe

Introduction: Welcome To The Working Week

• “In the 1800s, socialist and artisan William Morris wrote of the three hopes that might make word worth doing — ‘hope of rest, hope of product, hope of please in the work itself’” p. 3

• “The success of the latter part of the project depended on twisting those desires for liberation articulated in the late 1960s and 1970s, redefining ‘freedom’ away from a positive concept (freedom to

  do

  things) and toward a negative one (freedom

  from

  interference). Neoliberalism encourages us to think that everything we want and need must be found with a price tag attached.” p. 7

• “Hegemony is the process by which we are made to consent to the power structures that shape our lives.” p.11

• “How will people secure a living for themselves and their families? How do they find enthusiasm for the process of accumulation, even if they are not going to pocket the profits? And how can they justify the system and defend it against accusations of injustice.” p. 11

• “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 freelance journalist, there’s no one peering over their shoulder each moment — that is a huge swath of society.” p. 16

Part One: What WE Might Call Love

Chapter One - Nuclear Fallout: The Family

• “There is nothing natural about the 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…” p. 26

• “But this work, supposedly freely provided out of love, was in fact coerced at all levels, from the date down to the individual, and plenty of women continued to point out that they didn’t love the work, not at all.” p. 35

• “The women of the Wages for Housework Campaign took from the women of the welfare rights movement the understand that neither the workplace nor the family was a site of freedom. They wanted, instead, time for themselves, freedom to discover what love and sexuality might look like outside the relations of power and labor.” p. 41

• “The collapse of communism and the triumph of capitalist realism has led to diminished imaginings, too, of how domestic work could be done differently. Instead of the age of the ‘two-earner family,’ we hear a lot about ‘work-life balance,’ but not enough about how, for everyone ‘life’ (code for ‘family’) often means ‘unpaid work’.” p. 44

• “She also noted that the assault on abortion rights underway in much of the world has been an attempt to regulate the labor supply.” p. 44

• “They are the curdled side of the unfinished feminist revolution: frustrated with limited career paths prospects and a shredded social safety net, they retreat to the home and blame feminism — and non-white people for their plight. Today’s far right relies on the libidinal energy generated by this tension even as it pretends to simply defend what has been.” p. 46

• “The expectation of constant work, she said, created a ‘culture of just surviving without giving ourselves the breathing room to ask, ‘’What would the live that we really wanted be like? If we could be as creative as we wanted to be? If we could spend more time with our children?’” p. 52

Chapter Two - Just Like One of The Family: Domestic Work

• “It assumes that care that is paid for—like Seally’s—cannot be genuine, and that paying for work done out of love will somehow serve to take the love away.” p. 61

• “At a time—the 1930s and 1940s—when the demands of organized industrial labor and the inception of the New Deal means that most other workers were making gains in wages and successfully shortening their working day, domestic workers’ schedules remained grueling, with workweeks of up to eighty to ninety hours. As a result, like Seally, they spent much more time with their employer’s families than with their own.” p. 65

• “The most important thing, to her, is to continue to make her work visible and respected. ‘I always tell my nannies, ‘You have to demand respect because nannying is a profession. you have to be proud to say that you are domestic worker. You are the pillars of society. You hold up society.’” p. 82

Chapter Three - We Strike Because We Care: Teaching

• “That means, for instance, that the school is taught in multiple languages because teachers and the community believe it is valuable and just that students learn in the language in which they are most familiar. It means a commitment to antiracism and to teaching the students curricula that are relevant to their lives.” p. 85

• “Implicit in the rhetoric of choice, as Adam Kotsko noted, is the acceptance of personal responsibility—and the attendant blame if your choice doesn’t work out. It echos the line we’re often given about ‘choosing’ a job we love—as if work were a thing we decided to do for fun.” p. 99

• “From the strikes to their mobilizations against police violence that sparked in late May of 2020, these organizers have demonstrated a point that radical teachers have long known: teachers; fraught location in public life can be an immensely powerful one 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.” p. 103

• “In bringing teachers together with parents and students, they began to challenge the narrative that blamed teachers’ lack of care for the problems in publics schools.” p. 105

Chapter Four - Service With A Smile: Retail

• “Retail sales clerk is the single largest job category in the United States and also a common occupation in much of Europe. Even with the rise of Internet sales, a pandemic, and headlines in recent years proclaiming a ‘retail apocalypse,’ retail remains a cornerstone of the economy and a way that millions of people put food on the table. Yet those jobs, in so many cases, are ‘bad’ jobs, with low security, few benefits, erratic schedules, and virtually no opportunity for upward mobility.” p. 116

• “A ‘cool’ supervisor or one who is ‘like family,’ snack in the break room, those can make up for a lot if never expected a family-sustaining wage in the first place. But it is still important to remember that two-thirds of the retail workforce is in fact over the age of twenty-five, and trending older. There are a whole lot of people working retail who are, in fact, supporting others.” p. 125

• “Retail remains overwhelmingly gendered and racialized. Young workers of color tend to wind up in fast-food jobs, while white teens find jobs in higher-end retail. Those are the jobs more likely to be concentrated in whiter, wealthier areas that are harder to reach by public transit. Thus young people, in particular, tend to get jobs based on on economic need but on access. IF they do make it into retail, workers of color are more likely to end up in the stockroom than on the sales floor.” p. 126

• “Arlie Russell Hochschild noted that the risk of over identifying with the job was the dreaded ‘burnout.’ now a buzzword of sorts. Burnout, associated, in particular with the millennial generation, in the case of retail workers, could be the exhaustion that comes with convincing oneself over and over again that low-wage work is fun and fulfilling, even if not deserving of high wages.” p. 132

Chapter Five - Suffer For The Cause: Nonprofits

• “Charity has thus long been intertwined with the need to press workers into service and the accompanying suspicion of anyone who does not work. The Poor Relief Act of 1662 codified this relationship in England, setting up the poorhouse as the option for those who truly couldn’t work and didn’t have families to look after them; anyone else would be put to work.” p. 145

• “Corporate leaders advocated ‘welfare capitalism,’ as we saw in department stores, to alleviate the worst conditions of their workers and to encourage them to aspire to upward mobility rather than class power. As businesses consolidated and grew, reformers cast their eyes on the supposed inefficiencies of charities, organizing them in order to ensure the maximum effectiveness of their giving—and for ‘maximum effectiveness,’ read ‘giving on to those who we can be absolutely certain deserve help.’ ‘Scientific charity’ involved gathering extensive data on the poor, but it also entailed educating them about hygiene, as if their problem was that they didn’t know they ought to bathe, rather than the the only homes they could afford had little space in which to do so. Such education, in the United States, aimed to ‘Americanize’ new immigrants, assuming that rising out of poverty would be easier for those who fitted a certain image of hard-working whiteness.” p. 149

• “The tension at the heart of nonprofits remains that they are funded by the proceeds of an inherently unequal capitalist system, yet this system requires—indeed cannot exist without—humans who must be fed, housed, clothed and cared for. In doing that caring work, non-profits grease the wheels of that system; if they aim to stop its tolling, they may have to turn from work that allows the system to reproduce itself. This presents a difficult choice when that work is necessary for people to survive.” p. 155

• “This kind of results-oriented consumerism among funders leads to intense pressure on the workers to produce results that make their work look like a good ‘deal’ for the donor class, even if that ‘deal’ is a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.” p. 160

• “Both gendered tendencies produce burnout, and those who do burn out are judged as insufficiently committed or insufficiently radical. Those who have moved up in the organization through such of style of work impose it on others.” p. 161

• “As Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote, ‘the purpose of the work is to gain liberation, not to guarantee the organization’s longevity.’” p. 165

• “’They argue.’ ‘Well, you don’t do this work for the money. You do it because you care about it.’ It is like, ‘Well … Both? Why can’t I have both?’” p. 171

Park Two: Enjoy What You Do!

Chapter Six - My Studio Is The World: Art

• “The romantic attachment of the artist to his work is the counterpart of the familial love women are supposed to have for caring work, and these two halves together make up the labor-or-love narrative that shapes our perception of work today.” p. 180

• “Like caring work, art work was something outside of and contrasted to capitalist production—but while the carer presumably works out of love for those cared for, the artist has s romance

  with the work.

  No longer did art need religious value; it was now a higher good in itself.” p. 183

• “New York benefited from the destruction of European creative centers, becoming the world’s art capital. The image of the lone artist, the uniquely brillian individual differentiating himself from the crowd, served American Cold War interests. Jackson Pollock was the ideal American artist of the postwar period, splattering his id onto canvas, incomprehensible to all but those smart enough to understand his special genius.” p. 187

• “It is not surprising that artists are often loath to think of themselves as workers. Work, after all, sucks.” p. 193

• “In the space between these two joys—the anticipated thrill of success, and the pleasure of the art-making itself—most artists get lost.” p. 195

• The story of Vivian Maier, a nanny by trade whose massive oeuvre of hauntingly beautiful street photographs was found at an action after her death, echoes this trope—she appears to have taken her photos purely for the love of them, never attempting to show them in public. In a way, the ‘outsider’ or ‘naive’ artist is the ideal artist: working on their own with no hope or even desire for payment or acknowledgment, with no study and no one teaching them skills, they produce something surprisingly brilliant for no one’s edification but their own.” p. 195

• “When a handful of Wine creators with millions of followers demanded that the company pay them for their creations, it instead pulled the plug on the platform. Writer Malcolm Harris noted, ‘The important lesson from the story is that platforms would rather disappear entirely than start collectively bargaining with talent.’” p. 200

Chapter Seven - Hoping For Work: Interns

• “Even though her direct supervisor at the nonprofit provided an evaluation to the university, she didn’t think that gave the university enough insight to grade her, let alone provide a constructive evaluation or any real oversight of her working conditions. This, too, was a common complaint among the interns.” p. 209

• “Hope labor is a snake eating its own tail, and the intern is the hope laborer

  par excellence.

  ” p. 211

• “The interns replace the very employees they hope to be.” p. 211

• “The model of unpaid on-the-job learning made a certain kind of sense in politics, where the spirit of public service was supposed to draw people into the work. In practice, though, requiring unpaid work meant that only young people with a certain level of access and income could take advantage of the opportunity.” p. 215

• “As Camille Marcoux explained, because, in many places, unpaid interns are not considered employees under the lay, they often fall into a legal black hole when it comes to various workplace abuses. Discrimination, sexual harassment? If you aren’t an employee, say goodbye to what little legal protection you have to sue.” p. 220

• “So is Silicon Valley, where public-service language is often used to inflate the moral value of startups, but the accepted motivation for working for less now is that it will pay off late—what sociologist Gina Neff called ‘venture labor,’ a kind of bet placed that hard work now will pay dividends in the future, much like a venture capitalist might pour money into the same startup.” p. 221

Chapter Eight - Proletarian Professionals: Academia

• “Only later did [higher education] develop into a place for the kind of intellectual pursuits Katherine Wilson was looking for: independent scholarly work, with knowledge production more or less for its own sake seen as social good.” p. 237

• “The Humboldtian university combines research and teaching, expecting each professor to produce knowledge rather than simply passing it on. With this ideal was born the concept of academic freedom—freedom to learn and to teach. This mission of academe, to pursue truth, was supposed to set the university and its workers apart from the masses.” p. 238

• “As the infamous newspaper cover had it, President Gerald Ford had told the city to ‘Drop Dead’, leaving New York to fill its budget to fill its budget holes however it could, meaning deep austerity for public services and a turn to ‘business-friendly’ policies. CUNY tuition was one of the first things to be instituted—just a few brief years after it had truly been opened up to the working class. Bondholders had to be paid off; students, meanwhile would start taking out loans of their own, or more likely, for many of them, skip higher education altogether. The faculty union fought to keep its protections but could not stave off the institution of tuition, not stop the firing of hundreds of young professors, only recently brought on to handle the expansion.” p. 242

• “And that more prestigious research part of the job is increasingly commodified. In 1980, the US Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to generate funds from licensing intellectual property and the sale of research. Universities like Columbia—which made it policy almost immediately that the school had rights to faculty inventions, though they generously granted them royalties—generate hundreds of millions of dollars from their professors’ intellectual work.” p. 247

• “This kind of coercion links the working conditions of graduate students to other precarious workers—to retail workers and domestic. workers as well as interns—as it primes them to accept undervalued and insecure work in the future. And like welfare-to-work programs, graduate programs mobilize both moralistic language about hard work and a labor-of-love rhetoric that denies certain work is work at all by denying that what workers are paid is indeed a wage.” p. 249

• “Even at the time, NYU was a popular and relatively newly prestigious university, an emblem of the corporate and neoliberal turn in the academy, with high demand for applications and students who graduated with the highest debt load in the country. It also had one of the highest percentages of courses taught by non-tenure-track staff, including the striking grad students. Its president at the time had made an argument for the role of the university as anchoring a new key sector of the economy: he called it ‘ICE’ (intellectual, cultural, and educational) as a complement to New York’s famed FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate), from which the university drew most of its trustees. He had thus concretized the argument that the university was key to the new ‘knowledge’ economy, melding it with the ‘creative class’ even as he tried to worsen working conditions for those knowledge producers.” p. 251

• “If however the university is simply a machine for producing credentials, with degrees like commodities to be purchased by students shopping in the market, then it is harder and harder to argue for the necessity of faculty who have time and resources to develop their own minds. What political theorist James Cairns called ‘Austerity U’ is, he wrote, about ‘teaching disentitlement,’ not only to students, but also to faculty.” p. 252

• “That kind of pricelessness, she said, connects to the dignity that adjuncts are fighting for. ‘It is not just about pay. I don’t put poetry on par with house and food, but it is not far behind,’ she said. ‘Bare existence, bare subsistence, bare life, that is not our vision of humanity, and particularly for academics, we’ve immersed ourselves in the fruits of human creation and civilization. It is a painful oxymoron that then our daily lives and subsistence had become close to abject.’” p. 261

• “’People say’, ‘Why do you do it?’ ‘That is my answer. This is where dignity comes from.’” p. 262

Chapter Nine - Playbor Of Love: Technology

• “It’s a workload, Agwaze and the others said, designed for young men without families or caring responsibilities, who can dedicate their entire lives to the job. And indeed, the demographics of the industry bear this out: recent surveys of the United Kingdom’s games workforce found that the vast majority were young men.” (p. 265)

• “Some managers in the industry are starting to realize that they need to figure out better ways to retain experienced developers than trying to make the office feel less office-like. But the culture of the industry remains mired in the idea that putting in long hours is a mark of quality and dedication, rather than burnout and inefficiency.” (p. 267)

• “Those skilled workers are seen as geniuses the way artists used to be, gifted with superior abilities in a field inherently creative and specialized. Tech jobs are described as dream jobs, where most skilled workers are wooed with high salaries, great benefits, stock options, and fun workplaces where you can bring your dog, get a massage, play games, and, of course enjoy the work itself—and all this leads to more and more work.” (p. 268)

• “In the obsession with the individual genius, we miss the real story, assuming that works of brilliance are the result of singular minds rather than collaboration—a notion that just happens to mitigate against the idea of organizing.” (p. 271)

• “Later theorists named this

  playbour

  , simultaneously work and play, unforced yet productive. Adventure gaming blurred the lines between work and play just as the lines between work and home were being blurred by all those long nights at the office.” (p. 272)

• “The assumption remained that computers, like art, were something one had to have a natural talent for; women were good a community and caring for others, and men were goof at things that required isolation and antisocial genius.” (p. 273)

• “The workers adopted the work styles of the bohemian artist, bringing their expectations of creative labor to their new jobs in tech. They also brought a willingness to work in lousier environments in return for deferred financial gain (stock options, in many cases) as long as the work itself was stimulating, creative ‘work you just couldn’t help doing.’ Ross dubbed this phenomenon the ‘industrialization of bohemia.’” (p. 274)

• “The gamifiers are on to something—people hate drudgery, and no one expects to enjoy packing boxes and lifting them for an eight or ten hour shift. But it’s not being plugged into a game that makes work enjoyable or not. It’s autonomy that people value, and that is precisely what is being pitched with all those toys on the Facebook shop floor. ‘We trust you to get your work done,’ the toys are perks imply. ‘You can decide how and when to do it and how and when you have fun.’ With the feeling of autonomy comes the feeling that long work hours are a choice; the become a status symbol rather than a sign of unfreedom.” (p. 279)

• “Other workers in other countries have different challenges, but the demands of the UK union, voted on by the membership, are largely the same as the demands elsewhere. They include improving diversity and inclusion at all levels; informing workers of their rights and supporting those abused, harassed, or in need of representation; securing a steady and fair wage for all workers; and, of course, putting an end to excessive and unpaid overtime.” (p. 287)

• “The workers at games companies, and in the broader tech industry, were finally starting to understand themselves not as lucky to have a dream job, but as workers who are producing something of value for companies that rake in profits.” (p. 289)

Chapter Ten - It’s All Fun And Games: Sports

• “In sports, she noted, injuries and aging mean that you aren’t assured another shot. The only guarantee is that you won’t have it forever. But she also takes that moment to appreciate all the work she’s put in to get here.” (p. 293)

• “Sports, like art, is a near universal human habit that has been commodified and turned into a multibillion-dollar industry. It is also a lens through which we can see what—and who—we value as a society Sports tell us much about whose bodies and lives we think matter.” (p. 295)

• “Sports as what they have become today—a workplace for the players and team staff, and a multibillion-dollar industry that has made a small number of people incredibly rich, and provided a playground for those even richer to exert power—proves even harder to take seriously. After all, it’s just a game, right?” (p. 297)

• “[Jackie] Robinson did twice the work of anyone else on that field and still managed to be one of the best.” (p. 299)

• “Student-athletes, the court implied, were playing a game for fun and fore self-improvement, a narrative that comes back to haunt today’s players of professional and amateur ball alike.” (p. 300)

• “Women’s bodies being used for something so far from what we are told are for—for bearing and nursing and attracting others—hold power. And women athletes, more than men, are told that sports should be done for love, not money.” (p. 305)

• “That sports are not, in face, anything like real life doesn’t seem to matter. They still demonstrate to us that values that our society has chosen to uplift. Competition is the lifeblood of capitalism, we are told, and therefore competitive sports are the best place to teach us how to operate in a dog-eat-dog world.” (p. 306)

• “In forty states, the highest-paid public employee is a public university’s football coach. ‘For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the novel principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—’amateurism’ and the ‘student-athlete’—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes,’ Branch wrote.” (p. 310)

• “While the strike—reported, falsely, in the press as a ‘boycott,’ an indication of just how hard it remains for us to see sports as work—was short-lived, it was a powerful reminder of athletes’ platform and ability to force the rest of us to take notice.” (p. 315)

• “Running back Marshawn Lynch’s refusal to perform at press conferences is a job action, work-to-rule, a way of showing up the boss by performing strictly along the lines of your job description and by doing so highlighting the ways in which you are expected to give up more of yourself than that bit for which you’re getting paid.” (p. 315)

Conclusion: What Is Love?

• “Prisons are growing, social services are 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 heightened danger.” (p 323)

• “The positive ideals of freedom, choice and fulfilling work are increasing 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.” (p. 323)

• “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.” (p. 326)

• “Yet for so many of us, the couple form and the job wind up bearing the weight of all of our hopes and dreams and needs for human contact, and they were never meant to bear that weight. We need human relationships that extend beyond the romantic or the transactional.” (p. 327)

• “Instead of turning our desires to the objects we can buy with the proceeds from our endless work, what if we turned our desires back onto one another? Instead of, as Kipnis wrote, ‘routing desire into consumption,’ spending time with other people has potential to disrupt the entire economic system.” (p. 330)

• “They balanced the need to make a living against ‘needs’ for emotional sustenance, personal growth, and collective cultural expressions.” (p. 331)

• “This is what being alive is. It’s your heart pounding in your chest because of a text, the up-and-down swing that you get from connection and loneliness. The work itself only matters as a way to connect. All of the labors of love, stripped of the capitalist impulse to make money, fame and power, are really at the bottom attempts to connect to other people. They are attempts to be bigger and better than our lonely little selves—even the most solitary artist’s creations are in a way a request to be seen, to be known. Stripped of the need to fight to survive, how much more connection could we create? How more more could we try to know each other?” (p. 332)

• “What I believe, and want you to believe, too, is that love is too big and beautiful and grand and messy and

  human

  a thing to be wasted on a temporary fact of life like work.” (p. 335)