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

by Sarah Jaffe

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