Review: Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jaffe's tour of the working world is filled with keen insights and considerations about work as the center of most of our attention along with the unending ways we will sacrifice our mental and physical selves in order to be productive for work because there is rarely any other possibility. Through a series of chapters, she explores how work is construed and experienced in different industries from K-12 elementary to nonprofits to artists to babysitting/childcare to retail to technology to sports and even internships. It's a fascinating consideration of the similarities of disfunction that transcends all of these industries. Each industry thrives by preying upon people who are interested and often, excited about the work, and that excitement is used against them to eke more and more from them in terms of free labor, threats to their health, and sacrifice of caring or being present for one's own family. When resistance is indicated by individuals or the rise of unions, inevitably the employees are blamed for not loving the cause enough or wanting to do harm to others by failing to be subject to the exploitative means of employment. At Jaffe's core argument is the fact that we have a version of capitalism that has decided consumption, corporations, and production must come at the cost of actually having space to enjoy life for most people. The mechanisms we have created that leave most people in precarious financial situations and metaphorically (though sometimes literally) indebted to work are not necessary for society to thrive but this is the structure we're currently stuck in. For anyone who thinks their work is their life or that people aren't working "hard enough" (whatever that actually means) would find this an insightful critique of work culture that does not reject the idea of work but the way we currently do it.

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