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

by Sarah Jaffe

Neoliberalism didn’t just happen; it was a set of choices made by the winning side in a series of struggles. The victors remade the state to subject everything to competition; to enforce private property rights; and to protect the right of individuals to accumulate. Public services were sold off to private profiteers. Citizens became customers. Freedom was there, the neoliberals argued, you just had to purchase it.14

This dynamic is always individualizing—your situation in life must be the result of choices that you made, and thus no one else has any reason to sympathize, let alone to help, if you fall. Privatization, as Fisher noted, has brought with it the privatization of stress, the proliferation of depression, and a rise in anxiety. If you cannot get a job, it must be because you failed to do enough (unpaid) work to acquire the correct skills; if you get that job and it makes you miserable, just get another! Such discourse justifies the constant job-hopping that provides companies with what they want: just-in-time labor, easily hired and fired, easily controlled.

If we fail to love our work, it becomes another form of individual shame. Love, after all, is supposed to be an unlimited resource that lives within us: If the workplace is a family, shouldn’t we naturally love it?

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.

Exploitation is wage labor under capitalism, where the work you put in produces more value than the wages you are paid are worth. Exploitation is the process by which someone else profits from your labor.

Our willingness to accede that women’s work is love, and that love is its own reward, not to be sullied with money, creates profits for capital.

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.

“You always hear that people have got to work, they can’t be given something for nothing. But something like 60 percent of wealth in this country is inherited wealth,” she pointed out.

The problems of today’s nonprofit sector are outgrowths of this necessary inequality: nonprofits exist to try to mitigate the worst effects of an unequal distribution of wealth and power, yet they are funded with the leftovers of the very exploitation the nonprofits may be trying to combat. Nonprofit work then is also caring work, also service work, privatized, on the one hand, unlike public school teaching, but supposedly not in service of the profit motive. Nonprofits are not, despite their supposed lack of interest in profit, exceptions to the capitalist system but embedded in it, necessary to its continued existence.

It was with the rise of Christianity that charity became specifically about giving to the destitute. And such giving provided the benefit not of a pretty building that could be used in life, but the expectation of rewards in the afterlife for the donor.6

it illustrates how the wealthy exert control over the money that keeps society going, and the reason they can exert that control is that there are rules written into the tax code that allow them to do so.

Often, wrote Vanessa Daniel, founder and director of the Groundswell Fund, in the New York Times, philanthropists “gentrify” social change work. They start out by “noticing the success of strategies innovated by women of color,” she said, “but instead of funding them at the source, they are writing checks so that larger, white-led nonprofits can replicate their work.”

The assumption that “activists” are a different type of person, more committed than the rest of the world, replicates the old division between the volunteer service worker and those whom they served.

The professionalization of the nonprofit sector has now made it more acceptable a workplace for men, but it has also made it relentlessly middle class. The influx of men has added a new inflection to the tradition of feminine self-sacrifice already embedded into the history of the NGO sector: 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.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote, “the purpose of the work is to gain liberation, not to guarantee the organization’s longevity.

“There’s so much focus on the mission and the cause and people become, like at many nonprofits, very vulnerable to being manipulated into lower pay and less benefits for the cause.

Kerry Guinan, whose art is often in fact about labor, nevertheless said, “Ultimately, I don’t think it’s possible to interrupt or go outside capitalism through art. I do think it’s possible through organizing.”

I am not arguing that we should strive to be miserable at work—quite the contrary, we should take any opportunity for happiness, pleasure, and connection that we get. I do believe, however, that our desire for happiness at work is one that has been constructed for us, and the world that constructed that desire is falling apart around us.

Capitalism must control our affections, our sexuality, our bodies in order to keep us separated from one another. The greatest trick it has been able to pull is to convince us that work is our greatest love.