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

by Sarah Jaffe

As historian Stephanie Coontz wrote, to mourn the decline of the two-heterosexual-parent nuclear family is to be nostalgic for “the way we never were,” for a situation that never included everyone and by which few were well served. It is to lament the crumbling of an edifice designed to keep women’s labor cheap or free.4

Eliminating popular belief in magic, Federici wrote, was central to the creation of the capitalist work ethic: magic was “an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, a refusal of work in action.” The discipline (and at times torture) of the body during the witch-hunts helped lay the ground for the discipline of the body by the boss during the workday, not only the discipline of the time-clock but also of sore muscles, tired joints, and worn-out minds that it now became a woman’s job to soothe.12

This, too, was the period when the concept of race as we know it began to take shape—along with the designation of certain races as natural slaves, and of societies penalizing nonreproductive forms of sex. At the end of this period of upheaval, women were not simply firmly ensconced in the home, unwaged and rightsless, but the history of violence that had created that situation was simply wiped away. “Women’s labor began to appear as a natural resource,” Federici wrote, “available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink.” Even women’s sexuality, she argued, had been transformed into work.

The Fordist family wage not only served to normalize gender and the nuclear family; it also defined race and class by who was in and who was out of the public-private partnership that was the US welfare state.29

She also noted that the assault on abortion rights underway in much of the world has been an attempt to regulate the labor supply.61

THE ART MARKET OF THE NEOLIBERAL AGE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN designed purely in opposition to the demands of radical art workers of the past century. Art buyers hold art because of its value; its uniqueness points to their own brilliance as consumers, and acquiring it is a way for them to acquire some of the sheen of the artist on themselves. Art is perhaps the ultimate fetishized commodity, where the work that went into creating it is almost entirely mystified, forgotten, wiped away. It appeared as if by magic, as if buyers conjured it with their dollars, blessed by the sanctification of an art world that makes it clear that it is art, and art worth owning. The existence of the artist is only there as justification—this famed artist made this, therefore it is art.

One US survey from 2014 found that artists and other “creative workers” were more likely to come from middle-income homes even as they make something like 35 percent less than their comfortable parents did. A 2018 UK study noted that in addition to the very real barriers of money, artists also face a series of gatekeepers who remain attached to the idea of art as a meritocracy—gatekeepers who tend to come from more comfortable backgrounds themselves, making it easier for them to wave away the difficulties that artists of color with less (or no) family support face just getting to enter that meritocratic contest.37

the perception of the art world is that it is sponsored by the wealthy, but that in fact, “throughout history it has been artists and artworkers, more than any other actors, who have subsidized art production.” It is the artists, still, who have made art valuable, and so often that is because they have done their work out of love, and in fact have done plenty of other work in order to be able to support their art. Sociologist Andrew Ross called this “sacrificial labor,” a way that one gives up certain facets of stability in order to pursue work that is seen as meaningful—more meaningful, perhaps, even than personal relationships. (This notion echoes, of course, the conditions of the nonprofit worker.) Artists, after all, must love their work above all other things.

hours, “scut work,” and little power on the job. American medical interns and residents, some of whom are members of the Service Employees International Union’s Committee of Interns and Residents, have fought to reduce their workweek to eighty hours and to trim back twenty-eight-hour shifts to a mere sixteen. Yet the interns, in particular, still face arguments that what they are doing isn’t really work but part of their education. They also hear the familiar argument that their demands for shorter hours or rest breaks shortchange patients, that they should put their needs on the back burner to care for those in their charge—despite studies that have repeatedly shown the deleterious effects of long hours on a physician’s quality of work. Although medical interns and residents are paid, their salaries are a fraction of what a full-fledged doctor makes—they’re closer in pay to the hospital’s cleaners than to the attending physicians.

the accepted motivation for working for less now is that it will pay off later—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 that same startup. Venture laborers see such work as an investment in their future; as Malcolm Harris put it, “human capital is the present value of a person’s future earnings, or a person’s imagined price at sale, if you could buy and sell free laborers—minus upkeep.” In such an environment, the unpaid intern fits right in, hoping that their time, too, will be an investment that pays off. When times were flush, Silicon Valley paid interns and fêted them lavishly, but when the rough times hit, the interns were the first to go.28

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.31 To Aronowitz and others, the “last good job in America” could be a guidepost for all: shorter working hours and more autonomy could be key demands to improve others’ working conditions. Instead, though, the opposite has happened in the twenty years since he wrote about it: the academic workplace has become more like the rest of the service sector. For those who had that last good job, as it was with other parts of the PMC, it had been, for a while, easy to ignore the struggles of those outside the university, those with fewer credentials, doing manual labor, perhaps, or caring work.

The Silicon Valley workplace, created in the image of the boy king, seemed almost designed to erase the caring labor discussed in earlier chapters. No family, no friends, and no responsibilities outside of the office; within the office, all their needs are catered to, and toys are provided to make them feel eternally nineteen. (Facebook and Apple even offer egg-freezing to their employees, offering up a tech fix to the problem of work versus family, at least for a while, so that women, too, can abide by the “no families outside the workplace” rule.) It’s no wonder that the apps designed by all these man-children have been, collectively, dubbed “the Internet of ‘Stuff Your Mom Won’t Do for You Anymore.’” Need laundry done, dinner delivered, your house cleaned? There’s an app for that, and the app’s founders have no doubt been breathlessly hailed as technical geniuses, even though their real innovation is finding new ways to skirt labor laws.

The Greeks built a democracy around the idea that work would be done by someone else, whether slaves, banausoi, or the laboring classes, who were denied rights to participate in the activities that constituted citizenship. Citizens’ work was praxis, what Guy Standing described as “work done for its own sake, to strengthen personal relationships.” It was the work of what we call social reproduction, of the creation of a public communal life. They valued this work but also differentiated it from true leisure time, which they valued for its own sake.