Sarah Jaffe
Work Won't Love You Back
How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
Bold Type, 2021
What's inside?
The modern economy masks its exploitative nature by framing contingent, ill-paid work as a “labor of love.”
Recommendation
Journalist Sarah Jaffe argues that the modern ideal of loving your job is a neoliberal myth that re-brands the gig economy, and other tenuous or ill-paid labor, as the means to a more authentic life. The new paradigm, in which employers insist that workers should love their jobs – even as those jobs become less stable, prestigious and remunerative – perpetuates exploitation across the labor market. Jaffe uses theory, historical research and case studies to unmask that exploitation, calling for solidarity across the new working class.
Summary
About the Author
Type Media Center fellow Sarah Jaffe also wrote Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and cohosts Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast.
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