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

by Sarah Jaffe

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.