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

by Sarah Jaffe

Since the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a shift. The ownership class these days does tend to work, and indeed, to make a fetish of its long hours. But the real change has come in the lives of those of us who don’t make millions. 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.

The solution to this problem, for capital, was to squeeze labor harder. Companies closed factories in high-wage countries and moved them to places where they could pay a fraction of the rates workers commanded in the United States or the United Kingdom. Working hours began to creep upward, and incomes down; more families relied on two incomes, and with two working parents, no one had time to do the housework.

Neoliberalism encourages us to think that everything we want and need must be found with a price tag attached.

Hegemony is the process by which we are made to consent to the power structures that shape our lives.

Teachers are, in other words, perhaps the ultimate laborers of love. Expected to do more with less every time budgets need tightening, and yet to take the blame every time those budget cuts do harm, teachers epitomize the trap that has all laborers of love in its grip. If they demand better conditions for themselves, they’re called selfish,

Militant and surging unions were winning collective bargaining rights, and the hard-charging United Federation of Teachers (UFT), having won the right to represent all of New York City’s teaching force through a strike, wound up clashing with Black community activists.

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.

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.

Could automation, rather than taking away working-class livelihood and identity, free us to do something else entirely? We hear “robots are coming for our jobs” as a threat, but in fact it could be a way to create more free time for all. It will depend on who creates, designs, and owns the robots, or the algorithms.