Whatever Your Job, Read "Work Won't Love You Back"

 

My first thought when reading Sarah Jaffe’s masterful explication of the modern workplace “Work Won’t Love You Back” was about me and my disabled roommate living in a dump and being poor, but when people hear we can be at school without work or loans(mostly because we traded years of our lives for benefits.) and people still told us we were “so lucky”. I often thought I’d write a similar book about what was wrong with work, looking from outside, and call it “So Lucky” but I didn’t have the chops, then.
In the intervening years, though a disabled author wrote a searing psychological thriller called that, which is not very relevant to this particular discussion, but a good read, nonetheless.

Jaffe’s hypothesis is that “labor of love” and “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day,” are myths that swept in to fill the gap as the modern workplace became more and more precarious.Similar memes, including the requirement of even low-wage workers and interns to act out their “passion” for their work. Which doesn’t sound that awful, except if the job goes wrong, the worker might be tempted to blame herself and/or rob energy from other parts of her life to dig up more “passion”.

Another important thing I got from this book is to reconsider my image of what “exploitation” is. While it still happens in factories, mines, and other jobs that leap to mind as being dirty or other ways back-breaking, Jaffe points out elements of exploitation in jobs in the arts, retail, and sports, among others, since the money clusters at the top.
The internship chapter brought back painful memories of when vocational rehabilitation told me I had to choose between an internship and their paying for my degree for another year. I have spent a long time thinking that I should have gone with internship over sheepskin, but the interns in this book ended up having to organize for better conditions, along with most of Jaffe's other interviews.