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

by Sarah Jaffe

“neoliberalism… is really two quite specific things: first, a state-driven process of social, political, and economic restructuring that emerged in response to the crisis of postwar capitalism, and second, an ideology of generating market relations through social engineering.”

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

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.

Turning our love away from other people and onto the workplace serves to undermine solidarity.

The concept of alienation isn’t about your feelings; it’s about whether you have the power to decide where and how hard you will work, and whether you will control the thing you make or the service you provide.

Work, in other words, helps to tell us how to be. And changes in the shape of the workplace, in the shape of capitalism itself, have changed our expectations for what our lives will be like, for where and how we will find fulfillment. The concept of a “good” job is one that has changed over time and through struggle, a point we would do well to remember.

The compulsion to be happy at work, in other words, is always a demand for emotional work from the worker.

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—

Domination and subordination at work, as Kathi Weeks argued, are central to capitalism, and the workplace is where most people face the reality of how little freedom they have.

The process we call “class composition” occurs as the workers whose labor and lives have been organized by capitalism begin to understand themselves as a class and to act accordingly in their collective interests. We can see that process happening now, as workers who might have assumed themselves middle-class start to understand that their relationship to power means they’re still workers. The video-game programmer might have more in common with the Uber driver than she previously thought.

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.

The family itself was and is a social, economic, and political institution. It developed alongside other such institutions—capitalism and the state—and, like them, developed as a mechanism of controlling and directing labor, in this case, the labor of women.

Pitting their staff against the people they serve, nonprofit managers argued that if more money went to salaries, services would have to be cut. And the salaries are quite low to begin with: one 2014 study found that over 40 percent of nonprofit employees in New England, one of the most expensive areas of the United States, made less than $28,000 a year, well below the national median wage. One observer noted, “Too often, I have seen the passion for social change turned into a weapon against the very people who do much—if not most—of the hard work, and put in most of the hours.” Studies have found that nonprofits in the United States and Canada have higher rates of turnover than the overall labor market—a sign that workers are pressured to work long and hard and see little escape from that routine, other than leaving for a new job or perhaps a new sector.

But none of that stopped the spread of the unpaid internship. As the modern work ethic shifted and a job went from being a mere necessity—the main pleasure of which, as Adam Smith wrote, was the money—to something billed as the source of all fulfillment in life, it began to make a strange kind of sense that one had to earn one’s job.

The work itself only matters as a way to connect. All of the labors of love, stripped of the capitalist impulse to make money, fame, and power, are really at bottom attempts to connect to other people. They are attempts to be bigger and better than our lonely little selves—even the most solitary artist’s creations are in a way a request to be seen, to be known. Stripped of the need to fight to survive, how much more connection could we create? How much more could we try to know each other?

The strike itself is a means of reclaiming time from work, a way to demonstrate the workers’ importance by refusing labor and halting business as usual, but also a way to stake one’s claim to one’s time and one’s creations. In the midst of the strike, utopia is briefly visible. And the mass strike, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote, has the potential to turn the world upside down.

The protesters calling for the abolition of police and prisons, organizer Mariame Kaba wrote, “have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.”

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.