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

by Sarah Jaffe

Neoliberalism encourages us to think that everything we want and need must be found with a price tag attached.13

Neoliberalism was born in Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratic socialist Salvador Allende and, with the advice of American economists, reorganized the economy by force.

The first spirit of capitalism valued above all the accumulation of more and more money for its own sake, not for the sake of consumption. Consumption and other forms of pleasure were, in fact, to be avoided. One worked to be good, not to be happy. This process may have started with the church, but it had long since become common sense, Weber wrote. “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.”30

The difference between what the movements of the 1970s wanted and what they got was telling. They wanted democratic control over the firm; they got employee stock ownership plans. They wanted less work, a life less dominated by demands of the boss; they got fewer jobs and work fragmented into gigs. They wanted less hierarchical trade unions; they got union-busting. They wanted freedom for creative pursuits; they got, in Fisher’s terms, “managerialism and shopping.” They wanted to change their relationship to the patriarchal nuclear family; they got admonitions to see coworkers as family and the need to be constantly networking. They wanted more interesting work; they got simply more work. They wanted authentic human connection; they got demands to love their jobs.

During the coronavirus lockdown, one survey found that nearly half of men with young children reported splitting domestic duties equally—but their wives disagreed. Only 2 percent of women agreed that men were responsible for most of the housework during lockdown.

Living in London, Malone felt the inequality acutely. “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,”

But what all intimate labor has in common is that it brushes up against the line between what we think should be done for love and what we think should be done for money.

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, even as their demands are often ones that would improve their students’ lives as well.

This work—which sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild famously dubbed “emotional labor”—remains a major component of the retail salesperson’s job and a key difference between it and factory work.

White women like Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton turned from abolitionism to making the case for women’s rights in explicitly racist language; they believed that their education levels qualified them for the vote and to speak for others. They were thus, despite their opposition to one oppressive system, as Angela Davis pointed out, reliant on the inequalities of another one—industrial capitalism. They would work around the edges, perhaps demanding better housing for the poor or supporting a shorter workday for women in factories, but their investment in the system as it existed meant they often ignored the realities of exploitation.

“The majority of people who work in the arts will identify themselves as liberal to left-wing, often radically left-wing. This is going from the poorest artists to the highest paid curators in institutions,” artist Kerry Guinan argued. “But, if this is the case that we are a field in which everyone is all left-wing values, then why are we all agreed that the art world is a piece of capitalist shit that is relying on private capital that exploits its workers, that exploits artists, relies on unpaid labor?” Guinan continued, “This, to me, is living proof that art cannot change the world and that is why we need to organize. Artists need to realize how little power we all actually really have and how power needs to be built. It doesn’t come naturally and it is not a divine gift you get by being an artist.”45

When a handful of Vine creators with millions of followers demanded that the company pay them for their creations, it instead pulled the plug on the platform. Writer Malcolm Harris noted, “The important lesson from the story is that platforms would rather disappear entirely than start collectively bargaining with talent.”50

For people of color, who tend to have less family money to fall back on—median wealth for white households in the United States is around twelve times higher than it is for Black families—the internship is a barrier that keeps too many fields disproportionately white. Such inequality shapes the kinds of stories that get told, the sources reporters find worth interviewing, the subjects they care about.

For Aronowitz, teaching was a genuine pleasure; for many others, it’s simply a distraction from the research they’d prefer to be doing. One might be a good teacher and a brilliant lab scientist; it’s certainly possible, but nothing about the one suggests, necessarily, the other.24

A 2014 study found that one in ten people in the United Kingdom did not have a close friend; in a 2019 poll in the United States, one in five of the millennials surveyed reported being friendless. These studies reflected, a reporter noted, “long-term rising trends in loneliness.”