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

by Sarah Jaffe

“If domestic workers don’t show up for work, then the majority of the workforce can’t show up for work,” she said. “I love my work because my work is the silk thread that holds society together, making all other work possible.”

This historical tension—between the wealthy employers of domestics and the women who did the work—has continued to divide women and women’s movements right up to the present, giving well-off women a material investment in ignoring divisions of race and class.7

Public schools in the United States have always been hampered by the fact that they are mostly funded through local property taxes, meaning that the richer communities have more money to pour into schools, and poor neighborhoods suffer from less money per child.

Walmart was born in the rural Ozarks, in the northwestern corner of Arkansas, and there the company maintains its base to this day. From there, it grew, until, as historian Nelson Lichtenstein wrote, it controlled a swath of global trade roughly equal to that of the eighteenth-century Dutch East India Company.

In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy made a raise for retail clerks a campaign promise and got it enacted into law. That was despite the opposition of conservatives like Barry Goldwater, himself the scion of a department-store family, and Sam Walton, who viciously opposed the minimum-wage increase and demanded that his managers ensure the stores remained union-free.

Regardless, the company’s impact has been such that, as Bethany Moreton argued, “the economic vision we call neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, or free-market fundamentalism could also claim the title of Wal-Martism.”

Women at the time made up 72 percent of Walmart’s workforce but only 34 percent of its managers; they earned less than men at nearly every level of the company’s hierarchy. The company’s history of exploiting the service skills of women was still visible in the evidence in the Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., v. Dukes case: it had only added its first woman to the board in 1986, when then First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton joined up.

The history of charity, and of the development of what we now sometimes call the third sector—nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or, in the United States, 501(c)(3)’s, referring to their tax-code designation—is the history of the powerful distracting from their power by “giving back” to the less fortunate.

now a massive part of the workforce, about the same size as the entire manufacturing sector in the United States.

“The charitable ethic is based on hierarchy, and dependency on the part of the recipient; it responds only to immediate material needs and relocates collective concerns into a realm of private benevolence,”

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.

They were thus, despite their opposition to one oppressive system, as Angela Davis pointed out, reliant on the inequalities of another one—industrial capitalism.

Today, the nonprofit sector employs the third-largest workforce in the United States.30

Nonprofits also wind up competing with one another for funding, which in turn requires workers to spend their time marketing their successes—whether or not they truly achieved their objectives—to the funders, much the same way that for-profit companies market their products to consumers. But the “consumers” of nonprofits’ services are, in this model, the funders rather than the people being served. Nonprofits wind up structured like little corporations, with workers under a kind of pressure to produce that mimics the pressure of the assembly line.

This kind of results-oriented consumerism among funders leads to intense pressure on the workers to produce results that make their work look like a good “deal” for the donor class, even if that “deal” is a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.