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

by Sarah Jaffe

It’s become especially important that we believe that the work itself is something to love. If we recalled why we work in the first place—to pay the bills—we might wonder why we’re working so much for so little.

If we fail to love our work, it becomes another form of individual shame.

have a one-on-one love relationship with the job, then the solution for its failure to love you back is to move on or to try harder. It is not to organize with your coworkers to demand better. Collective action is unthinkable; the only answer is to work harder on yourself or to leave.23

“burnout”—for what is burnout but the feeling experienced when one’s labor of love is anything but—

Labor, after all, is us: messy, desiring, hungry, lonely, angry, frustrated human beings. We may be free to quit our jobs and find ones that we like better, as the mantra goes, but in practice that freedom is constrained by our need to eat, to have someplace to sleep, to have health care.

Work, in other words, helps to tell us how to be.

THE IDEA THAT WORK SHOULD BE A SOURCE OF FULFILLMENT HAS BECOME common sense in our world, to the extent that saying otherwise is an act of rebellion.

If caring work is familial love, based in the all-sacrificing love of the mother, creative work is romantic love, based in a different kind of self-sacrifice and voluntary commitment that is expected, on some level, to love you back. Yet work never, ever loves you back.

The compulsion to be happy at work, in other words, is always a demand for emotional work from the worker. Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love. This new work ethic, in which work is expected to give us something like self-actualization, cannot help but fail. Most jobs will not make us happy, and even the ones that do will often be a source of deep frustration—

feminists were going into the workplace just as the bottom was falling out of it. Women were expected to pick up the slack by taking up paid work while not reducing the amount of work they did in the home.

Globally, United Nations researchers estimated in 1999 that all unpaid reproductive labor, if paid, would cost $16 trillion, a third of the world’s total economic activity—$11 trillion of which would be women’s share.

According to the foundation’s own documents, one in every four charter schools created in the United States has received Walton Family funds. Such an investment in education has ideological goals; it aims to reshape schools and what and how they teach. After all, with widely accessible education, but service industries dominating the economy, what we get is educated workers doing service jobs, and so the Waltons and others like them aimed to make sure those workers believed in the system under which they worked.

the poor were beginning to be seen as a potential problem, a force capable of unrest, of uprising. They had to be controlled, corralled into the workplace or the workhouse, under the watchful eye of their betters. The state would provide relief, but only under certain circumstances

The training required for these jobs meant that women won access to expanded higher education, including medical and law schools. As long as the women’s desire for education was “rooted in virtue and not in ambition,” as Kessler-Harris wrote, they could even go to business school.

Through these tax laws, the state has always been deeply intertwined with NGO and nonprofit work, subsidizing their privatized provision of social services. The foundation allowed the wealthy to extend their influence beyond their corporate domain; they were, they felt, by virtue of being extremely rich, best suited to decide how others should live their lives.

The World Health Organization characterizes burnout as “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy.” Such a definition, of course, assumes that one had a mental connection to one’s job and positive feelings about it to begin with; only the “exhaustion” part applies equally to all workers. Burnout, in other words, is a problem of the age of the labor of love, and it’s no surprise that it is often discussed in the context of nonprofit or political workers.

These workers are expected, like Ashley Brink was, to give their lives over to the work because they believe in the cause; but it becomes harder and harder to believe in the cause when the cause is the thing mistreating you.

the “cowboy mentality” that comes from political and labor organizing, that values the toughest work, the biggest commitment, as a mark of dedication to the cause. Work-life balance is something that these workers choose to give up, missing the way that their choices quickly become job requirements—something that only shows up later, when they want to take time off. Both gendered tendencies produce burnout, and those who do burn out are judged as insufficiently committed or insufficiently radical.

We started to hear more about “stress” and mental health on the job than physical injury. Until the aftermath of World War II, the term “stress” was rarely used to describe something that happened to humans; researchers, though, began to apply the term to the wear and tear on the human body caused by, among other things, psychological strain on the job. By the 2000s, it had overtaken physical ailments as a cause of absence from work. Like “burnout,” we can understand this concept as a side effect of the cracks in the labor-of-love myth. Fewer of us may be getting physically injured on the job, but more of us are struggling with the emotional toll of work.

academic labor “contains a spirit of vocation and reciprocity” that is why people still aspire to it. Yet, she noted, “when people insist that the university is simply a place of love, and not also a place of work, they offer cover to exploitation—of staff, of students, and of the ideals of the university itself.… Those who insist that striking lecturers do not love their students fail to see that love can still be work, and that the picket can be a classroom.”

the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—‘amateurism’ and the ‘student-athlete’—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes,”